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THE MEANING OF GO re 


BY 


HARRIS FRANKLIN ‘RALL, PuD., DD. 


Author of “A New Testament History,” “A Working 
Faith,” “ Modern Premillennialism,’” etc. 


THE ‘QUILLIAN LECTURES 
For 1924 


Delivered at Emory University 


COKESBURY PRESS 


NASHVILLE, TENN. 
1925 


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Copyright, 1925 
BY 
LAMAR & BARTON 


PREFACE 


“RELIGION, writes a recent reviewer, “to most of 
my acquaintances remains the synonym of the house 
of bondage. Once they outgrow the subordinations 
of youth, they spontaneously, joyfully, cast religion 
aside.”’ If there is any truth in this comment, it repre- 
sents a tragic misconception of the real nature of 
religion. For it is the very purpose of religion to offer 
men not restriction but release. It is the open door 
for the mind of man seeking a meaning for the world 
and life that will lift him above the hard order of 
physical nature. It is a release for the spirit of man 
seeking the vision and the power of a new and larger 
life. The message of religion has always meant “good 
news” for those who bore it. 

Let us not too quickly conclude that those who wish 
to throw it aside are simply seeking to rid themselves 
of the demand which religion makes, the narrow door 
by which man’s spirit must always enter into the larger 
life. However that may be, we do well to ask our- 
selves whether it may not also be true that the men 

1 


iv PREFACE 


of our day do not understand religion for what it 
really is. Religion, which is freedom and life, tends 
constantly to lose itself in those forms which of neces- 
sity it must create when it seeks to express itself, its 
creeds and codes and ritual and organization. It is 
far easier for the mass of men to hold the form than 
to know the life, and the result is that the life may 
be lost in the forms which should serve to express it. 

There is then a double task which rests upon every 
generation, and especially upon those of us who believe 
that in the weakness and distraction of this period the 
liberation and guidance of religion are the supreme 
need. First, we must further the life; religion itself 
must come to a new birth as the experience of the 
eternal here in time, of its power to liberate and its 
right to command. Second, we must reinterpret this 
life for the thought and needs of our day. 

It is to this second task that the following chapters 
are dedicated. They aim to set forth the significance 
of religion by pointing out the meaning of God. Reli- 
gion lives from the conviction that there is a world 
of spiritual reality in which the meaning of human 
life is to be found, and that world for us is summed 
up in the idea of God. What now does God mean 
for the life of the man of to-day? If religion is to 
abide in power, it is this which must first be made 
clear. If man feels no need of God, if God remains 
simply a topic in theology, an article in the creed, 
or a philosophic system, then the great mass of people 
will pass him by. It is God as the heart of a living 
faith that needs to be shown to men, 


PREFACE Vv 


The writer then does not aim primarily to furnish 
a philosophy of religion; excellent philosophical ex- 
positions of the idea of God have been furnished in 
recent years by such men as Hocking, Pringle-Pattison, 
Sorley, Henry Jones, and Beckwith. Neither is the 
aim here to defend or expound traditional theology. 
The writer takes his stand frankly within the Christian 
faith, convinced that the meaning of the world and 
of life has come to men in the God and Father of our 
Lord Jesus Christ. He seeks to make plain what 
such a faith means for the thought as well as the life 
of the man of to-day. 

But while the aim is to set forth the meaning of the 
Christian conception, the attitude is not dogmatic nor 
the method merely to set forth traditional theological 
formule. No appeal to external authority will settle 
these matters for the man of to-day. At every step 
the attempt must be made to consider the world about 
us in the light of our best knowledge as it bears on 
this our faith, and then to ask what this faith means 
as we bring it to bear upon this our world. 

The substance of this volume was presented as a 
series of lectures on the Quillian Foundation at Emory 
University. The writer wishes to express to the 
Faculty of the University his appreciation of the honor 
of the invitation to deliver these addresses as well 
as of many other courtesies shown to him in this 
connection. 

While the order of discussion here followed seems 
to the writer the logical one, the reader less familiar 
with such inquiries may find it more interesting and 


vi PREFACE 


profitable to begin with the third chapter, taking the 
first two chapters last. 
HARRIS FRANKLIN RALL. 


GARRETT BIBLICAL INSTITUTE 
EVANSTON, ILLINOIS 


CONTENTS 


I 
PAGE 
THE Gop WHolIs Far . Eby Th. sue tute nahh bite 


Religion roots on the one side in man’s needs, on the 
other in the conviction of an invisible world answering 
to these needs. The sense of a higher Power is vital to 
religion. 

The Christian conception of a God who is above man 
involves: (1) The idea of a creative and controlling 
Power. Science has not changed this. (2) A directing 
Purpose, not supplied by the scientific theory of evolu- 
tion. (3) A supreme and absolute Goodness realized as 
moral authority and as ground of our hope. 

The transcendent God of religion is not the philo- 
sophical Absolute as such, yet God is absolute for religion 
as ultimate power and good. 

The meaning of the far God for religion. 


II 
THE Gop WHo Is NEAR RMR We Aone hen 


Farness and nearness of God both needed—loss to 
religion in one-sided emphasis on either. The near God 
is the God related to human life. The place of possible 
conflict with science and history, and of possible help. 

The nearness of God in nature. The idea of a dy- 
namic, developing world; involves an imminent God and 
creation as continuous. 

The nearness of the God of love in personal help and 
fellowship. The meaning of redemption, of creation as 
progressive incarnation, of God as indwelling Spirit. 
Demanded by the moral character of God. Implies his 
nature as personal. 

vil 


viii CONTENTS 


III 
PAGE 


THE DEMOCRACY OF GOD) ily 0000, ee 


God as known through experience: individual and sub- 
jective, in nature, in the social order. The facts of the 
new social age, as regards industry, as regards social 
relations. The religious needs of the new age. 

Two competing social theories of to-day. (1) Pagan- 
ism: materialism, selfishness, militarism. (2) Democ- 
racy: a social faith, not merely a form of political or- 
ganization; involves the sacredness of human person- 
ality, freedom as a goal and a method, solidarity, faith 
in man and in ideal forces, authority as inner and ethical 
and not external and arbitrary, obligation. 

God as democratic. Not the traditional autocratic 
conception, but more than modern humanism. ‘The God 
who cares for men; whose goal is a free humanity, and 
whose method is that of freedom; whose authority is 
moral, spiritual, and rational; who, as himself good, is 
under the law of obligation; who has faith in men and 
in moral-spiritual forces. 

What Christianity offers to democracy: an ideal of 
life, a needed and possible authority, a moral dynamic, 
a needed faith. 


IV 


Gop AND THE WorRLD oF EvIt ... 3 


The problem of evil. Unsatisfying answers. Funda- 
mental considerations. 

The seeming moral indifference of nature and the 
world of order. The alternative of a world of chance, 
anarchy. Natural order as correlate of the character of 
God. The condition for cultural progress, for moral 
development. 

The problem of suffering. The function of pain. The 
value of struggle. Transformation of conflict, not elimi- 
nation, aimed at. 

Suffering through social relations. The social relation 
as essential condition of all higher life. The Christian 
principle of vicarious suffering. 

The principle of development, The meaning of toil 


CONTENTS ix 


PAGE 


and pain in a world that is in the making. The signifi- 
cance of the life beyond. 

The modern world view and the problem of evil. The 
answer comes to the obedient faith. 


V 


Tue Gop oF Our Lorp JEsus Curist. . . 98 


Christ as the definition of Christianity. The primary 
question, not the nature of Christ, but the nature of God. 

The historic fact of Jesus. The meaning of the fact. 

The moral lordship of Jesus. Jesus conscious of his 
own absolute meaning here. The meaning for the indi- 
vidual ideal, for the social goal. His moral mastery 
rests even more on his spirit than on his word. Demands 
true humanity. His life in relation to God, to men. Its 
completeness. His life as human, as moral achievement; 
as divine, a gift and deed of God. The moral meaning 
of the spirit of Jesus as the first element in the absolute 
character of Christianity. 

The meaning of Jesus for the idea of salvation. Scope 
of this idea. Christianity finds the crucial problem in 
sin. What Jesus does for men. Salvation in the social 
sphere. The conclusion: God saving men in Christ. 

Jesus as the revelation of God and the master of faith. 
The supreme question. Jesus’ teaching as to the holiness 
of God, his righteousness. God as love. The vision of 
God in the spirit of Christ. 

The Christology of the future. 


Vi 


THe INDWELLING SPIRIT . Po SOR AON tn (OCD 


The central place of the idea of the Spirit. The neg- 
lect in historic Christianity due to lack of clear and ade- 
quate conceptions, misuse by special groups, attitude of 
ecclesiasticism. Permanent basis in historical Chris- 
tianity, in continuous experience, in abiding religious 
needs, and in the Christian conception of God. 

Two constant elements in Biblical idea of Spirit. The 
two divergent conceptions. 

The primitive conception: the Spirit as force alien in 


CONTENTS 


nature to man. This idea wider than Christianity, con- 
tinuous in Christianity. An objection from “modern 
psychology.” The fundamental question: Can God give 
himself to man? 

The personal-ethical conception of the Spirit. Rests 
upon another conception of God. The work of the 
prophets in relation to nature of God and of religion. 
Paul sees the Spirit as ethical (Christ spirit), its work 
in whole range of Christian life, its place in normal 
experiences, its nature as Spirit of God, as union of 
religious and ethical. 

Lapses from this position in the thought of the 
Church: the spirit as extraneous power, as quasi-physical 
substance. 

The mode of the gift of the Spirit, determined by the 
concept of God. ‘Transcendent emphasis means alien 
power or substance received through emotional experi- 
ence or sacramentarian agency. A personal, ethical God, 
akin to man, means the gift of the Spirit through per- 
sonal fellowship. The meaning of sacraments; grace 
through truth; Holy Spirit and moral fellowship; com- 
munion with God through fellowship with men. 


INDEX oF AUTHORS Bae Nike ; RE ee ie 
INDEX OF SUBJECTS “e e le! fey Tey e 


THE MEANING OF GOD 





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THE MEANING OF GOD 


I 
THE GOD WHO IS FAR 


THE debate about the meaning of religion is one 
that has gone on among scholars for many a year. 
It will go on for years to come, for we seem to be 
not much nearer to agreement than we have been in 
the past. The reason is not far to seek. Religion is 
not one thing in our human life to be marked off and 
studied; it is the inner side of everything. There is 
no part of human nature which does not come to 
expression in it; it is a matter of mind and heart and 
will, There is no part of human life which it does 
_ not lay hold of; inner and outer, individual and social, 
custom, duty, beauty, truth, it relates itself vitally to 
all. It takes different forms. It appears as creed and 
offers a philosophy of the world and life. It comes 
to us as ethics and seeks to direct all behavior. It 
creates organizations, churches, which include whole 

3 


4 THE MEANING OF GOD 


peoples and live on from age to age. It takes form 
as culture, or mode of worship, with priests and 
prayers and hymns and sacraments and rites of every 
kind. And to different individuals and peoples and 
ages, different aspects of all this make their appeal. 

Out of all this, however, two elements emerge. We 
might describe religion as an ellipse and say that its 
curve moves about these two foci. Indeed, we may 
say that at every point religion is determined by these 
two centers of interest. 

The first of these is the needs of men. On that 
we are more and more agreed: religion roots in man’s 
nature and his fundamental needs. It is not an idle 
curiosity looking out on the world and trying to find 
an explanation. It is not a fraud forced upon men 
for the profit of priests. It is not a matter of meaning- 
less custom passed on from age to age. That is why 
religion remains in the midst of change. The codes 
and customs of religion vary from age to age. 

Ritual, most tenacious of all, comes under the same 
rule—what church in all the earth has the same cus- 
toms as did Paul’s churches or that at Jerusalem? 
And as for creeds, one might say that their form 
changes most of all. But religion, banished by perse- 
cution, confuted by argument, defeated in its hopes, 
suffering not least from the disloyalty of its adherents 
or their mistaken zeal, has lived on, growing weak 
at times, yet coming again and again, in changed form 
it may be, to a greater rebirth. All this is possible 
only because religion rests upon something basic in 
man, 


THE GOD WHO IS FAR 5 


There are two fundamental urges of human life 
that all recognize: hunger and love. It is hunger that 
has forced man to toil, that has sharpened invention, 
driven to thought and study, led to codperation with 
his fellows, compelled great migrations, and has been 
the mainspring of war down to our own day. It is 
love that has built families and communities, states 
and nations, that has made man willing to take up 
burdens which he would not assume for himself, that 
has been the fruitful soil of high ideals and noble 
sentiment. Without hunger the individual could not 
survive, without love the race would perish. 

Is religion, then, a third instinct to be placed by 
the side of these? No, not if you think of it as an 
independent instinct. But we may put it by the side 
of these two and call it the third great hunger of 
our humankind. For there are these three sides to 
our human life. There is the physical which binds 
us to earth, the social that binds us to our fellows, 
and this third which takes in these others but goes 
beyond them. 

It is man’s quest for meanings and values, his rela-. 
‘tion to the whole world of the unseen. How they 
come we do not now ask, but here they are, these 
ideals and values. There is man’s sense of the worth 
of his own life; it may be selfish at first, but at its 
best it takes in human personality as a whole. Here 
is his feeling for moral values, for what is right and 
just and good in his own life and in the group. Here 
is his sense of unity and order and purpose. All this 
may be suggested by the world in which he lives, but 


6 THE MEANING OF GOD 


it is very plain that he feels here not so much what 
is as what ought to be. The world that is, at least 
this world that he sees and handles, does not show 
him these things. There is no justice in rocks and 
trees, no love in the silent stars, no moral ends that 
appear in the storms.and tides, no clear purpose in the 
passing years. And he himself with all his hopes and 
ideals and sense of human worth, what is there in 
nature that pays heed to him? What is he more than 
a grain of sand on the shores of time compared with 
the infinite spaces in which there float a million million 
suns? 

But religion is not constituted by the mere sense 
of man’s needs or of the goods which he desires. 
Leaving the question aside as to how this may have 
arisen, there remains the fact of man’s sense of a 
higher power which is inseparable from religion 
wherever this appears. God and man’s need, these 
are the foci about which religion always moves, man’s. 
need and the answer in God. For that is what re- 
ligious faith is; it is the conviction that there is some- 
thing that answers to this need, something in which 
lies man’s highest good, the meaning and end of his 
life and the help by which he may achieve it, Looked 
at from one aspect you may say that at every point 
as we plot the curve of religion we find the dominating 
idea of man’s needs and the goods he desires. But 
it is equally true that at every point there is the deter- 
mining thought of that higher reality which religion 
calls God. God is not one of our religious beliefs; 
he is the belief. He is not one doctrine; he is the 


THE GOD WHO IS FAR fi 


heart of all doctrine. Is there a Truth in which all 
partial truths find their place and meaning? That is 
God. Is there a Life from which all life comes? That 
is God. Is there a Righteousness in which all that 
is holy and just and right has its perfect being? Is 
there a Power on which our weakness depends, a Help 
that answers to our need? Is there a final Good in 
which all our goods have their being and their goal 
and their assurance of achievement? All that is in 
the meaning which religion sees in God. 

Men may not believe in this God; they may pass 
him by, or search and not find him. But two facts 
are clear; one is the presence of this hunger in our 
humankind, the other is that when a man really finds 
God, this is the place that God fills. No one among 
the modern “‘seekers after God” has said this more 
effectively than H. G. Wells, writing in the war novel, 
“Mr. Britling Sees It Through,” into which he put 
so much of his own experience. “Religion is the first 
thing and the last thing, and until a man has found 
God and been found by God, he begins at no beginning, 
he works to no end. He may have his friendships, 
his partial loyalties, his scraps of honor. But all these 
things fall into place and life falls into place, only 
with God. Only with God.” * But that is only repeat- 
ing in a modern way what all the saints have seen 
and known. Augustine said it: “Thou hast made us 
onto thyself, and our soul is restless until it rests in 
thee.” And the psalmist phrased it for us long ago: 


1See the whole passage, “Mr. Britling Sees It Through,” 
pages 438 ff. 


8 THE MEANING OF GOD 


“Whom have I in heaven but thee? 
And there is none upon earth that 
I desire besides thee. 


“My flesh and my heart faileth; 
But God is the strength of my heart 
And my portion forever.” 


The goods and ideals of the group will, of course, 
especially in the earlier stages, play the leading role 
here and in this day we have come to a clearer recog- 
nition of the place of social values in religion. But 
there is a curious blindness to what for men of religion 
has always been at the heart of their experience, when 
religion is simply equated with “the consciousness of 
the highest social values.” * Orthodoxism, for which 
religion can be stated in terms of traditional and 
authoritative doctrine, rationalism (so much like 
orthodoxism in its one-sided intellectualism), for 
which religion is a philosophy discoverable by man’s 
reason, and the moderns for whom religion is merely 
a social function or a social passion—these all alike 
miss this unique quality of religion. -for religion is 
man’s life as lived in relation to something higher than 
himself, a being upon whom he feels himself de- 
pendent, from whom he expects help, and to whom he 
recognizes his obligation. 

In his significant book, “The Idea of the Holy,” 
Rudolf Otto has given a searching analysis of religious 
experience, especially in its more primitive forms. 
Call it mana or wakanda or orenda, or call it, as Otto 
does the numinous, or simply the holy in the experi- 

2Ames, “The Psychology of Religious Experience,” page vii. 


THE GOD WHO IS FAR 9 


ence of religion man becomes aware of something 
higher than himself. It may come to him some night 
when the tempest reveals its overwhelming power and 
his own impotence. He may feel it in the mysterious 
presence of death or in the awe that is stirred by the 
glory of sunrise or the wonder of the stars. Lone- 
liness and the sense of peril in strange surroundings 
may quicken it as with the fleeing Jacob, but in some 
way the soul of man awakes to a strange presence and 
cries out: “Surely God is in this place; and I knew 
it not.” Awe, wonder, fear, fascination, a sense of 
dependence are all mingled here, and all are called 
forth by the growing feeling of man that he is in the 
presence of something that is more than himself or 
his fellows or the world of things about him, and that 
this higher power has a meaning for himself and his 
world. . 
This sense of a higher presence, moreover, abides 
as religion moves up into more ethical and spiritual 
forms. There are those who will dispute this. We 
do not reach the higher forms of religion, they will 
say, until we eliminate the supernatural reference. We 
must rationalize religion and ethicize it, they declare; 
we must set it forth in logical and demonstrable ideas 
and make it practical by reducing it to moral ideals 
and rules. Unfortunately when religion reaches this 
stage it tends to die out, losing not only its hold as 
religion but its moral power. But, indeed, they are 
mistaken as to the highest form of religion. The idea 
of the supernatural, of that which is above this natural 
world in power and beyond man’s comprehension, of 


10 THE MEANING OF GOD 


that which has the right to command man’s life and 
before which be bows in awe—this is not found merely 
among the primitive and superstitious, nor does it dis- 
appear when religion becomes ethical and rational. 
The world knew no higher religion before the coming 
of Jesus than that of the Hebrew prophets. It was 
a rational religion, one that appealed to the mind, 
calling men to worship not some blind and inscrutable 
power but a God whose character was revealed and 
whom men might know; and it was an ethical religion 
alike in its concept of God and its demand upon men. 
Yet the prophets have this same idea of a God high 
and lifted up, filling the hearts of men with reverence 
and awe. Where is there a truer picture of the soul 
of reverence bowed before the most High than in the 
story of Isaiah’s call, or a more lofty vision of the 
God who moves with power and purpose in nature 
and history than that which is given us in the second 
Isaiah? It is not otherwise with Jesus. He does not 
hesitate to speak about fearing God. He bids us pray 
“Our Father,” but we do not get the power and meaning 
of these words except as we sense their background 
in the words that follow, “who art in heaven, hallowed 
be thy name.” For these latter words bear all that 
thought of the God of infinite majesty and power, 
the holy God, before whom the soul of man is to be 
hushed in reverence and fear. And the literature of 
religion has no scene so searching, none so fitted to 
awaken awe and humility, as the picture of the pray- 
ing Jesus in Gethsemane, the Son of Man with soul 
prostrate in the presence of the Eternal, in awe and 


THE GOD WHO IS FAR 1! 


humble submission before that which seems to have 
been hidden even from him. 

Our own age, in which we have been so busy har- 
nessing up religion to everyday tasks, gives evidence 
of this feeling for the infinite and this hunger for the 
eternal. It may be seen in the revival of mysticism. 
It appears in a growing appreciation among students 
of the real nature of religion. The very religious 
aberrations of our day, Christian Science and theo- 
sophy and “new thought,” and the rest, point the same 
way. And, at far remove from these, does not the 
strength of “fundamentalism” lie in this direction? 
Its method may be quite mistaken, with its insistence 
upon tradition, its external authority, its Biblical 
literalism, and its mechanical conception of the super- 
natural; yet it has made large numbers feel that it 
alone is preserving the supernatural, the essentially 
divine and eternal in religion. And what shall we 
say of the appeal of the Roman Catholic Church, 
whose crowding worshipers are surely impelled by 
something more than a fear that they may be excluded 
from a future world whose keys the Church holds? 
Has not this Church set itself definitely through its 
cultus to appeal to this sense of the supernatural? 
And in our Protestant Churches, with their traditional 
intellectualism, whether dogmatic or rational, and with 
their emphasis on the social and practical, is there not 
coming a deeper appreciation of worship, a worship 
with beauty and order and reverence and helpful sur- 
roundings, all as means to lead men into the presence 
of the divine? 


12 THE MEANING OF GOD 


So far we have spoken only in general terms of 
this idea of the far God. We have thought of it as 
the infinite, the eternal, as that which, however near 
to man, is yet above him and the whole world of finite 
things in power and meaning. We need now to define 
the term more closely: We will begin with a historical 


consideration, with the idea of holiness, and first of | 


all as this appears in the Old Testament. So accus- 
tomed are we to the Christian idea of holiness that 
it is hard to get back to the original Old Testament 
meaning. In its primary sense there is nothing ethical 
in holiness, no reference to character; nor is its first 
meaning, as so often stated, that of separation, 
whether of God from his world, or of man from sin 
or ceremonial defilement. These are later ideas. 
Holiness belongs first of all to God. It is that which 
makes him God, his power and majesty, his contrast 
with all that is finite and perishable and weak. It is 
that which the nations must come to recognize. When 
in Ezekiel Jehovah says, “I will be hallowed” (that 
is, recognized as holy), he means that he will assert 
his power so that the nations that have oppressed 
Israel will recognize that he is really God. Holiness 
is that before which men are to bow in reverence 
and awe, as did Isaiah in the temple. 

Such an idea could be easily abused. Men thought 
of the power as something strange and mysterious, 
something incalculable. It was like the electricity of 
the live wire, useful but needing to be handled with 
care, able to help but also to inflict great harm. This 
power was not necessarily thought of as joined to 


THE GOD WHO IS FAR 13 


character and purpose. It could be communicated to 
persons and objects, and then these needed to be 
handled with care. An Uzzah with the best of inten- 
tions might touch the ark and be killed, while the 
same ark brought great prosperity to Obed-edom sim- 
ply by being lodged at his home. It is this primitive 
idea of the holy that has gone over, for example, into 
the Roman Catholic Church, where holiness is less a 
matter of the ethical than of such a strange mysterious 
quality or force that can belong to things quite as well 
as to persons. It was a conception that could give 
rise to all kinds of superstition. With the growth of 
insight the idea of the holy undergoes change. In fact, 
the transformation of the idea of the holy is the index 
of the development of religion. For the prophets the 
majesty of Jehovah and his power are not blind or 
strange or unknown in their meaning. Jehovah is 
more than a power before whom men are to bow in 
fear. “Jehovah of hosts is exalted in justice, and God 
the Holy One is sanctified in righteousness.” * The 
transcendence of God comes to be seen not in mere 
might, in dazzling splendor, but in his mercy and 
righteousness. The name of Jehovah is still “the Holy 
One of Israel,” but it is in his spirit and character 
that he is holy, or lifted above men.* Christian” 
thought is wonderfully expressed here when Paul 
speaks of the light of the knowledge of the glory of 
God, not in the majesty of the stars or the power of 
the storm, but in the face of Jesus Christ. That which 


3 Hallowed means “seen as holy,” Isaiah v. 16. 
4Tsaiah ly. 1-9. 


14 THE MEANING OF GOD 


now commands the worship of man, that before which 
he bows in deepest awe, is moral majesty. And yet 
it would be wholly wrong to suppose that the Christian 
thought of holiness becomes merely that of goodness. 
It is not simply goodness: it is goodness joined to 
power. We do not simply look up to God and say, - 
“There is goodness, I should obey it.” There remains 
still the sense of infinite power, of ways that we can- 
not fully comprehend, the sense of reverence and awe. 
Nor let us forget that Jesus himself, who taught us 
the word of simple trust, “Father,” with which to 
approach God, used also the word “fear.’’° The heart 
of religion is reverence and awe. 

Religion then, at its highest as well as lowest, roots 
in this thought of a Being that is above man. We 
turn now to the Christian thought of God and ask 
more specifically what this idea of the far God means 
in the Christian faith. It means first the God of crea- 
tive and controlling power. God is the God of power. 
He is not simply one of many beings in this world 
that we know, a little stronger, it may be, than the 
rest. He is not simply an idea of beauty or goodness, 
in itself helpless to command or to aid its worshipers, 
like some Venus of Milo whose beauty men admire 
but who has no arms to lift her worshipers. There is 


5 Matthew x. 28. That is why religion is so different from 
magic. That is why I cannot but feel that writers like Frazer 
are wholly wrong when they make religion rise out of the failure 
of magic which drives men to the idea of gods who will help 
where other things have failed. Religion does not begin with the 
idea of gods as beings who can be used, however closely it may 
be allied with man’s sense of need. 


THE GOD WHO IS FAR 15 


a striking Old Testament expression to which we may 
well go back for our thought; it speaks of Jehovah 
as “the living God.’ That does not mean “the being 
of God” about which we debate so much; that way 
lies philosophy. Religion demands far more; it must 
have not just a God who exists, but one who counts, 
a God who does things. That is “the living God.” 
So Israel saw God in the storm that swept down from 
the hills, in the smiling harvest, in the defeat of their 
enemies; yes, and it was the triumph of the moral 
insight of the prophets that they saw God in the very 
victory of their foes and the reverses of Israel. 


“Thou art the God that doest wonders; 

Thou hast made known thy strength among the peoples. 
The voice of thy thunder was in the whirlwind; 

Thy lightnings lightened the world: 

The earth trembled and shook. 

Thy way was in the sea, 

And thy paths in the great waters. 

Thou leddest thy people like a flock, 

By the hand of Moses and Aaron.” ® 


Nowhere is this more finely set forth than in Second 
Isaiah." Here the pure religious instinct asserts its 
faith. Despite political reverses and national disasters 
and the overwhelming superiority of the foe, whether 
in miltiary power or in ancient “culture,” the prophet 
proclaims the God who has created all things, who 
nightly leads forth the silent stars, who directs history, 
who sets kings upon their thrones to work his will 
even when they do not know him. 


6 Psalm Ixxvii. 14, 18-20. 
7 Note especially Isaiah xl to xlv. 


16 THE MEANING OF GOD 


There are those who fear in the name of faith that 
modern science would change all this, and there are 
some who assume to speak for science and declare 
this to be a fact. The latter assert that science has 
shown that there is in this universe one energy, and 
one alone, fixed in amount, working by inevitable law, 
explaining all, determining all. Nature is a great 
Machine and we have no right to think that there is 
a Soul in it or a Power above it. There is no place 
here to confute this argument. It suffers from one 
fatal defect: it leaves out of account one whole world 
of reality, the world of personal-spiritual life; it 
leaves aside the forces which are mightiest in com- 
manding and shaping the life of humanity—hope and 
fear and love and justice and brotherhood, and the 
whole conscious human life of impulse and interest 
and ideal. J do not minimize what modern science 
has really done in changing our view of the world. 
It has pushed back the boundaries of the universe 
beyond all our imagining, not only into the infinite 
astronomic spaces, but into those equal marvels of the 
infinitely small where the orbits of electrons are plotted 
like the orbits of the stars; and not only the boundaries 
of space, but those of time as well. Second, it has 
asserted the sway of law, the reign of order in all 
the universe. Third, it has shattered the old geocen- 
tric world, with all its meaning for man’s thought 
of himself and his relation to the universe, and has 
made our earth a tiny fragment amid infinities. 
Finally, it has changed the old static system, in which 
all things had their final form and fixed place, into a 


THE GOD WHO IS FAR 17 


world where forces have taken the place of things, 
where all has come to its present state through endless 
eras of change, and where the same development is 
still taking place. 

Undoubtedly these changes have affected deeply the 
forms of religious thinking; and, more than that, be- 
ginning with Copernicus, faith felt its foundations 
shaken too; for men are always inclined to identify 
their faith with the form in which it has been held 
and feel that religion is gone when some altar is 
moved or a phrase is changed in the creed. But in 
the end these changes have made it no whit harder 
for faith to find the living God in his world. Science 
to-day, no more than at any previous age, concerns 
itself with the final questions of life or can answer 
them—the question of the Power that moves in all 
forces, of the Life that is the source of all life, of 
the Mind whose thoughts are reflected in that order 
which we call law, and of the Meaning which works 


through it all to some final goal. Indeed, science is. 
helping us to a truer and larger vision of God. How  - 


could it be otherwise, if it be true science, since its 
subject is the world of God? Faith saw long since 
that God’s ways were those of wisdom and steadfast 
character; the faithfulness of God, in Old Testament 
phrase, means just this. What science means by law 
is just the order that belongs to such a dependable 
God; the correlate of the natural law of science is the 
character of God. Further, science has made impos- 


sible the old idea of an absentee God. Either we must © 


find God in the ongoing processes, the ever-moving 


~ 


18 THE MEANING OF GOD 


forces of this world, or else we have put a blind energy 
on the throne and made God an impotent idea. Science 
has helped us regain the Old Testament idea of a living 
God. And so it has helped us to see that the creative 
work of God is an ever-renewed story and not an event 
of the past. 

Christian faith sees this far God, this God that is 
more than this world, in the second place, not only 
as Power but as Purpose. The God of purpose is 
above the world, while still working in it. The world 
by itself, whether in nature or history, compels no such 
conclusion. ‘There have been those, it is true, who 
have found in the world itself the plain evidence of 
purpose and progress which nature is working out. 
And this rather shallow optimism has in the last 
generation or so been wont to clothe itself in scientific 
form. Evolution, so its logic ran, is an established 
fact of science. Evolution means development, prog- 
ress. That development is by natural forces and is 
inevitable. Evolution therefore will be for us science 
and religion both, and we need no God. Andrew 
Carnegie gives us a rather naive expression of this 
in his Autobiography: “When I, along with three or 
four of my boon companions, was in this stage of 
doubt about theology. .. . I came fortunately upon 
Darwin’s and Spencer’s works. . . . Reaching the 
pages which explain how man has absorbed such men- 
tal foods as were favorable to him, retaining what 
was salutary, rejecting what was deleterious, I remem- 
ber that light came as in a flood and all was clear. 

. I had found the truth of evolution. ‘All is well 


THE GOD WHO IS FAR 19 


since all grows better,’ became my motto, my true 
source of comfort. Man was not created with an 
instinct for his own degradation, but from the lower 
he had risen to the higher forms. Nor is there any 
- conceivable end to his march to perfection.” * It need 
hardly be said that all this is not science but philosophy. 
When the Great War came it showed what human 
nature, plus science and engineering and minus reli- 
gion and ethics, could do. The philosophy of man’s 
natural goodness and of inevitable progress in the 
universe broke down and Mr. Carnegie broke off the 
writing of his autobiography. Nature shows dystele- 
logy as well as teleology; human nature shows de- 
generacy as well as progress. If nature is to be more 
than a mere mechanism and history more than a tangle 
of events or an endlessly repeated and unmeaning 
cycle, then we must believe in a God who is more 
than nature, in whom purpose and meaning have their 
reality. Without that we should be much more con- 
sistent if we took the gloomy view of Bertrand Russell 
and held that “man is the product of causes which 
had no prevision of the ends they were achieving; that 
his origin, his growth, his hopes and fears, his loves 
and beliefs are the outcome of accidental collocations 
of atoms; that no force, no heroism, no intensity of 
thought or feeling, can preserve an individual life be- 
yond the grave; that the whole temple of man’s 
achievement must inevitably be buried beneath the 
debris of a universe in ruins.” ® 


4 
8 Andrew Carnegie, “Autobiography,” page 339. 
® “Mysticism and Logic,” page 47. 


20 THE MEANING OF GOD 


There is a third form in which this vision of a far 
God is held by Christianity and that is in the thought 
of absolute goodness. It is not power which a spiritual 
man worships. If the gods be only that arbitrary will 
which some theologians have set up, then we might 
well honor Prometheus in his defiance of them. But 
the heart of a spiritual religion lies in the conviction 
that power and goodness are one. That is the mean- 
ing of our first great confession, “Our Father, who 
art in heaven”; for by Father we mean goodness and 
by heaven the place of rule. God is for us the supreme 
and perfect goodness. We know something of Good- 
ness here, but it is mingled with evil; it is at best only 
the good in the making. Above all the world’s evil 
or imperfect good rises the goodness of God, the per- 
fect holiness. This transcendent goodness means for 
us three things. It means a good and a right that are 
real and not a mere idea or dream. It means next 
a good that has a right to command, a righteousness 
which it is our highest life to obey. And it means, 
finally, a good that is to triumph. We do not fight 
for the good in a world of blind forces, nor yet with 
evil tipping the scales against us. Rather the stars 
are fighting in their courses against Sisera, the unseen 
forces are on the side of good. What Socrates said 
is true: “If the gods do not prefer the good man to 
the evil, then it is better to die than to live.” If the 
foundations of the world are not laid in righteousness, 
if goodness be not the highest reality, 


“Then earth is rotten at the core, 
And dust and ashes all that is.” 1° 


10 Tennyson, “In Memoriam.” 


THE GOD WHO IS FAR 21 
The God that is far means for us the reality and 
authority of righteous, and the foundation for all high 
hope of the future. 

But here we come to a group of questions that have 
concerned Christian thinkers and others a good deal 
of late. This far God of whom you are speaking, 
is not that what philosophers mean by their Absolute? 
Are you not leading us away from religion into ab- 
straction? Or are you not falling back into that out- 
worn theology that pictured a God far removed and 
made of him an autocrat whose essence was sheer 
power and arbitrary will? What we need, say these 
voices, is a God that is linked in closest fashion to 
our human life. What we want is not a hard and fast 
system dominated by an all-controlling will. We want 
a world of action and life and growth, with place for 
human freedom and initiative and responsibility. Is 
it not a finite God that we want? So we have Mr. 
Wells with his Comrade God fighting with us against 
the blind forces of the Universe, and Mr. Dickinson 
with his “Religion of a Social Passion’ whose God 
is apparently an idealized humanity, and Professor 
James with his pluralism that would seem to give room 
for a good many gods, and Samuel Butler, who will 
have no theologian’s God sitting above the clouds, but 
whose God seems pretty much identical with the 
animal and vegetable world.** 

Now some of this protest is certainly in eee 
Philosophy is interested commonly in the abstract, in 
some final substance, some world ground, some abso- 


11 “God the Known and the Unknown,” pages 55, 67. 


22 THE MEANING OF GOD 


lute, in which is found the unity and the explanation 
of the whole. Religion on the contrary is concerned 
with personal relations and the value of the individual ; 
in the words of Mr. Balfour, in “a God whom men 
can love, a God to whom men can pray, who takes 
sides, who has purposes and preferences, whose at- 
tributes, however conceived, leave unimpaired the pos- 
sibility of a personal relation between himself and 
those whom he has created.” ** The formal definitions 
of the theologians, anxious to remove God from all 
limitation, full of assertions of abstract perfection, 
have resulted in something very far from the real 
concern of religion and the real experiences of life. 
Nor is it much better when a theologian like John 
Calvin pictures a God of arbitrary will, backed by 
irresistible power which carries his decrees into effect. 

But when we have conceded all this, the fact remains 
that religion demands the absolute. For religion al- 
ways centers in the highest; it is man seeking, with 
sure instinct, something before which he can bow and 
in which he can find the completion of life. In the 
highest sense, there is no religion until a man has 
found that which has the right to command his life 
and in which he can trust. But when a man has found 
this, then this is his absolute, this is his God. The 
good that can command men will be no partial, no 
relative good; it must be a goodness with absolute 
reality, a goodness fundamental to the universe itself. 
It is the good that is God for us. The power that 
we worship must be more than some being like our- 


12 “Theism and Humanism,” page 36. 


THE GOD WHO IS FAR 23 


selves, struggling like Mr. Wells’s Invisible King 
toward a goal that must ever be uncertain. It is not 
that we ask for sheer, irresistible power. It is no 
autocratic universe that we seek; but we do want to 
know that the goodness which is God commands the 
power that will lead at length to its goal. 

This then, I take it, is the sense in which Christian 
faith demands an absolute God, whether we care to 
use that term or not: a God who is the source of all 
life and being, upon whom all things are dependent, 
who himself is not dependent for being upon aught 
outside himself, whose reason moving in all makes 
one ordered universe, whose goodness is perfect and 
has the right as such to command, and who has the 
resources to carry this world, through whatever sac- 
rifice and toil may be needed, to a final goal of good. 

At least a brief reference should be made to the 
idea of God as above human knowledge. There is 
an essential element of agnosticism in the Christian 
faith, and the great spokesmen of the Bible bear wit- 
ness to it. God is always for us both revealed and 
hidden. So he appears in the lofty lines of Job, where 
faith holds to God yet realizes his hidden ways. Paul 
is sure that men may know the character of God in 
Jesus Christ, yet he cries out: “How unsearchable are 
his judgments, and his ways past tracing out! For 
who hath known the mind of the Lord? or who hath 
been his counsellor?” It is Martineau who writes: 
“Tt is the essence and beginning of religion to feel 
that all our belief and speech respecting God is untrue, 
yet infinitely truer than any nonbelief and silence.” 


24 THE MEANING OF GOD 


And John Owen gives the reason for this: “We know 
so little of God because it is God who is thus to be 
known.” ** Augustine’s phrase has too often been 
forgotten by the dogmatists when he declares that he 
uses the term “persons” in connection with the Trinity, 
not because he would say this, but that he might not 
keep silent. These great teachers are all of them sure 
of God, sure that he has turned his face upon them, 
that they know him, that they can trust him utterly, 
that their life is to be found only in absolute devotion 
to him; yet at the same time they have the keenest 
sense of the infinitude of being in God that is beyond 
their knowledge. 

It remains for us to note briefly the meaning which 
this conception of the God that is far, or the 
transcendent God, has for religion. By the far God 
we mean the God who is not only in man, but who 
is more than man, who is above us in power, who is 
absolute in goodness, from whom is the order and 
unity that obtain in the universe, in whom is the pur- 
pose that gives meaning to all. What does this signify 
for religious faith? 

Here is, first of all, moral transcendence and moral 
authority. The good is not our dream, it is really exis- 
tent. The object of our aspiration is not an imperfect 
and idealized we, but a perfect Thou. Our loyalty is 
not simply to our group, or even to a total humanity 
as such, but to that humanity as seen in the good 
purpose of this God. The breakdown of moral sanc- 


13 The two quotations are taken from a suggestive passage by 
H. G. Wood, “Living Issues of Religious Thought,” pages 21, 22. 


THE GOD WHO IS FAR 25 


tions in our day makes clearer than ever how deeply 
we need the conviction that there is a right and good 
which is more than social convention or individual 
preference, that it is grounded in the very foundations 
of the world order, and that it speaks with authority. 
It is not that we do not have to search for this good 
which we must obey, not that our experience must not 
help point the way, not that it comes to us as external 
authority, but that, however it comes, once here we 
know that it is more than we and that it has the right 
to command our life. 

There is, in the second place, the conviction that 
this transcendent goodness is also transcendent power. 
Of itself, the mere thought of supreme power does 
not evoke religion in man, any more than does Schlei- 
ermacher’s absolute feeling of dependence. There 
is, indeed, a thought of the infinite or even of sheer 
power which brings to man a crushing sense of insig- 
nificance and impotence, which casts down instead of 
lifting up. So modern astronomy may well terrorize 
the imagination of man who is thus reduced to noth- 
ingness. That was Carlyle’s thought when his friend 
exclaimed over the glory of the heavens on a clear, 
starry night and the dour old sage replied, “Man, it 
is just terrible.”’ The infinite spaces of the skies or 
the blind fury of the sea with its irresistible power 
may well awaken such a feeling. But there is a power 
that lifts up as well as casts down; it is the power 
to which a man prays and which he can trust. When 
a man has found this, then he has found his God. 
Then power has a face that man can read and a heart 


26 THE MEANING OF GOD 


that man can trust. Then power becomes liberation, 
not oppression, and man rejoices in it as that which 
makes him strong in confidence, which brings him 
courage as it brings him peace. Bishop F. J. McCon- 
nell tells of a Scotch regiment that he addressed one 
night during the World War just before they were 
to move up to the front line trenches, and how, when 
he asked them to sing at the close, the voices that came 
from here and there all called for the same hymn: 


“O God, our help in ages past, 
Our hope for years to come.” 


The great hymns and psalms which have lifted the 
hearts of men in worship have been those in which 
men rejoiced in a majesty which they could worship 
and a power they could trust. Here is the reason 
for worship and joy: 


“For the Lord is a great God, 

And a great King above all gods. 

In his hand are the deep places of the earth; 
The strength of the hills is his also. 

The sea is his, and he made it; 

And his hands formed the dry land.” 


Not so clearly, and yet of the same spirit and the same 
source, is the reverent confidence that breathes through 
John Burroughs’s poem, “My Own”: 


“Serene I fold my arms and wait, 
Nor care for wind or tide or sea; 
I rave no more ’gainst time or fate, 
For lo! my own shall come to me. 


THE GOD WHO IS FAR 27 


“IT stay my haste, I make delays, 
For what avails this eager pace? 
I stand amid eternal ways, 
And what is mine shall know my face.” 


Here is the same sense of an order and a power above 
man which mean for him life and peace. 

Burroughs’s poem suggests the last consideration in 
the matter of the meaning and value of this concep- 
tion, and that is the assurance of the final achievement 
of the good. We shall consider later the tragic fact 
of evil in the world. That fact of itself, however, 
is not destructive of faith so long as man is convinced 
that the issue is certain. But the fight for the good, 
and the loyalty to the right and true, will not last 
long where men lack the assurance that the good and 
right form the power that rules this world. Moral 
faith demands religious faith; without such religious 
faith it has never been able to maintain itself in 
strength and permanence among men. (What man 
needs is the assurance that the high ideals that com- 
mand his life, the hopes that stir him as he thinks of 
the future of mankind, are more than his dreams, that 
they are the expression of the will that rules the world. 
It is this truth which appears, however imperfectly, 
in the old doctrine of election and in the apocalyptic 
hope of early Christianity, and the truth has permanent 
place both for individual assurance and for social faith 
to-day. The form has changed, but the Christian man, 
with all his stress upon freedom and initiative and 
responsibility, still faces the future unafraid because 
the world order is on the side of the angels and there 


28 THE MEANING OF GOD 


is something more than his own strength. “Ye have 
not chosen me, but I have chosen you.” Fear not, 
little flock; for it is your Father’s good pleasure to 
give you the kingdom.” 


NOTE 


The foregoing discussion has sought to consider the idea of 
God constantly from the point of view of its place in religion, 
and not as a dogmatic concept. It stands in very definite dis- 
agreement with the conception of religion typically voiced by 
E. S. Ames in his “Psychology of Religious Experience.” ‘There 
is no reason why Professor Ames should not set forth his per- 
sonal faith as he has done in “The New Orthodoxy.” There, 
we are told, God is to be found in the associated life of men, 
that he is, in fact, nothing more than this associated life as 
idealized and personified. He is compared to the individuality 
of a college class to which each member shows loyalty and 
reverence. So God apparently is the vague idea for Professor 
Ames, wavering between the composite life of humanity as it is 
and the ideal that humanity holds before itself. This is under- 
standable, though one wonders as to the justification of the use 
of the word “God” by Professor Ames in a sense so different 
from what readers share or congregations at worship assume 
when it is used. 

But there is a major criticism which is to be raised against 
Professor Ames and all those for whom religion is to be under- 
stood simply in its social function, for whom God is an idea that 
is to be “utilized,” a convenient rallying point for our ideals and 
emotions, but not a being of objective reality apart from the 
life of the worshiper or his group. The criticism is that these 
men are not describing what religion really is. The dogmatist 
has gotten the better of the scientist, the effort at description 
has passed over into the defense of a norm, and the effort at 
descriptive psychology is vitiated by this unconsciously operative 
interest. We can sympathize when Professor Ames says, “The 
highest type of religion to-day is that which has the finest devo- 
tion to the most adequate ideal of life,” or when he sums up 
religion as involving, ‘“Reverence for life and for the moral 
distinctions which commend themselves to the experience of the 


THE GOD WHO IS FAR 29 


race; love for our fellowmen .. .; and the forward-moving 
action of life in the quest for better things than have yet been 
achieved.” 14 

But over against this, two facts need plainly to be stated. 
First, if you are trying to describe religion as it is or as it has 
been through long ages, you are leaving vast ranges of religious 
life out of account, and it is quite unjustifiable to say flatly: 
“These then are the attitudes of the religious life.”15 Further, 
religion at its highest includes more than what is here given. 
It involves something that we call God, and a God who is more 
than our human life first idealized and then personified. It is 
of the very breath of the life of religion to believe that this 
which it worships is, that it has power, in the end that it has 
some absolute place in the world. Without this, religion might 
live on with a few of the poetically or ideally minded; it would 
die in the hearts of the multitudes whose God must mean reality 
and authority and help. 

Two quotations may be added which seem to the writer to 
reflect more truly the nature of primitive and of developed 
religion at this point. “The quality of holiness and of absolute 
obligation are the surest mark of genuine religion from the 
beginning throughout history.”1® “It is in the long run impos- 
sible for religion to remain contented, as the esthetic conscious- 
ness can, with an object which is merely its object, without 
placing it, so to say, in the center of things, and relating to it 
everything in itself and in its environment.”17 In the higher 
forms of religion there is involved here, as Webb goes on to 
suggest, a definite Welianschauung, but at every stage religion 
involves not only values and interests, but an objective reference, 
the thought of some Being with power, with meaning for life 
by way of help and command. 


14“The New Orthodoxy,” pages 95, 27, 28. 

15 Jbid., page 27. 

16 S6derblom, “Natuerliche Theologie und allgemeine Reli- 
gionsgeschichte,” S. 62. 

17C. C. J. Webb, quoted in “Foundations,” page 426. 


IT 
THE GOD WHO IS NEAR 


RELIGION moves in paradoxes; it is no wonder then 
that we find something of paradox in its central idea, 
that of God. And the paradox is this, that for religion 
God must be at once that which is far and that which 
is near. Until a man has found that which is above 
_ him, there can be no reverence, no trust, no devotion, 
“and so no religion. But so long as this Being remains 
_ simply a Being above him, religion will be equally 
wanting; for religion lives only as man believes that 
this higher Being somehow draws near, that somehow 
he touches man’s life, has some meaning for him, 
bears upon his destiny. 

The great teachers of religion have known how to 
unite these contrasted conceptions in the unity of their 
faith, The prophet sees “the Lord sitting upon a 
throne, high and lifted up,’’* but he does not leave the 
temple till this same Lord draws near to cleanse his 
lips and bring his commission. Jehovah is “the high 
and lofty One that inhabiteth eternity, whose name 
is Holy,” who dwells “in the high and holy place’; 
but in the same breath we are told that he dwells “with 


1Tsaiah vi. 1. 
30 


THE GOD WHO IS NEAR 31 


him also that is of a contrite and humble spirit.”? A 
whole volume could not enforce the thought of the 
nearness of God more than the one word “Father” 
with which Jesus opposes alike the weak faith of men 
and the distance to which Judaism often removed God 
in its thought; yet he bids us pray to this God as the 
one who is in heaven and whose name is to be made 
holy. 

Such paradox, which is the very life of religion, 
seems intolerable however to theology and philosophy, 
and so the tendency has always been to isolate one 
of these elements and carry it out to its conclusion. In 
traditional theology it is the farness of God which 
has received this emphasis—that is, the idea of God 
as transcending humanity. Its most common fofm 
in popular thought has been Calvinism. Here we have - 
the supremacy of power, God as absolute sovereign. 
The final word for faith is not the glory of God as 
revealed in the character of Jesus, but ‘“‘the omnipo- 
tence of God, by which, according to his secret counsel 
on which everything depends, he rules over all.’ When 
the mind calls for light or the affronted moral sense 
rises in revolt, there is no answer except that of decrees 
and decisions that rest upon “the mere pleasure of the 
divine will.” . “Everything which he wills must be 
held to be righteous by the mere fact of his willing 
it.” * The other form which has been taken in theology 
by this one-sided emphasis on the transcendence of 
God has been an abstract idea of perfection. Here the 


2Tsaiah Ivii. 15. 
3 Calvin, “Institutes,” Book III, chapter xxiii. 


32 THE MEANING OF GOD 


supreme concern has been to lift God above every 
condition, every limitation, every likeness to the human 
or finite. Instead of a living God touching human 
life, we have the long list of attributes, omnipotence 
and omnipresence and omniscience and the rest, an 
analysis of which will show that they are at bottom 
really negations, denials of limitation. 


“Whatever you say, I tell you flat, 
God is not that.” 


In both these cases you have a beautiful logical 
system, but at the expense of religion itself. The 
God of sheer sovereign power leaves no room for 
moral freedom and responsibility, and makes goodness 
sccond to might. The God of abstract perfection is 
a philosophical idea rather than the object of a living 
faith. It endangers what is the very life of religion, 
the thought of personal relation. It lifts up an abso- 
lute substance or idea, where man wants personal fel- 
lowship. It is the influence of Greek philosophy still 
persistent in Christian theology, and its God as an 
absolute idea demands a static world. Christianity 
moves in the line of Hebrew thought and interest; its 
God is high and lifted up, but he is a living God who 
moves in his world and his world is one in which high 
purposes are being carried out. 

It is true that the one-sided emphasis on the near- 
ness of God is just as inimical to the interests of 
religion. Some of its representatives must be con- 
sidered more in detail later on. There is the pantheist 
for whom God is not only present in his world, but 


THE GOD WHO IS NEAR 33 


merged with his world, so that the world and God 
are one. There is the man who, like Mr. Wells, must 
have a finite God if he is to save his faith in a good 
God in the presence of the world’s evil. There is the 
humanist, who identifies God with humanity and finds 
in an idealized humanity the object of devotion and 
the ground of hope. But here too it is religion that 
suffers, the religion that must have for reverence a 
higher good than it finds in itself and that must have 
as object of trust a power that can fulfill its hopes 
and aims. 

If there is paradox in this double demand for a 
God that is far and one that is near, then that is 
because life itself shows this paradox, a certain ten- 
sion, a conflict of interests and ideas which may find 
some ultimate unity, but in which the central meaning 
of our present life is found. Such are the ideas of 
dependence and freedom; on the one hand the sense 
of a whole, a higher something that shuts us in and 
determines us on every side, on the other the sense 
of freedom, of independence, and of consequent re- 
sponsibility. Such is the seeming conflict of the 
individual and the social: the feeling that our own 
life is sacred, that the expression of self and its 
achievement must be our end, yet at the same time the 
realization that our life must ever be faulty and im- 
perfect except as we relate ourselves in being and 
devotion to the social whole. In the words of Josiah 
Royce, “Every man who learns what the true goal 
of life is, must live this twofold existence—as separate 
individual, yet also as member of a spiritual com- 


34 THE MEANING OF GOD 


munity which, if loyal, he loves, and in which, in so 
far as he is loyal, he knows that his only true life is 
hidden and is lived.” ¢ 

The questions of deepest interest to faith come to 
the front when we consider the near God. For the 
question of the near God involves just this: What 
difference does religion really make? What does God 
mean for my life and the world’s? Where does he 
really touch it? Religion does not live from the 
thought of a distant Power, or an abstract Idea; it 
lives through this thought of a near God who makes 
a difference, who is really related to this world of 
human experience and daily happening. And if 
modern theology differs from traditional theology at 
any one point more than another, it is here. Tradi- 
tional theology begins with a system of abstract ideas, 
a perfect and ordered realm of doctrine existing by 
itself; present-day theology begins with the concrete, 
with that which is near, with the world of religious 
experience and need, and seeks to find God and know 
God in and through this world. Just as much as ever 
it demands the Eternal, it cries out for God; but it 
wants a God related to life and it will know this God 
in and through his world. It has been criticized for 
its “anthropocentric theology,” ° for its humanism and 
naturalism, and there is some ground for this; but 
as a matter of fact, on the whole its interest is more 
truly and constantly religious than is the older ortho- 
doxism which was often quite as abstract and intel- 


4“The Problem of Christianity,” I, 203. 
5 Schaeder, “Theozentrische Theologie.” 


THE GOD WHO IS NEAR 35 


lectualistic as the old rationalism which it fought. We 
want a God that makes a difference. 

Our first task then in our study of the near God 
is to find the divine in the human, the eternal here 
in the world of time, to show that the far God of 
our faith is the near God in our world, to bring men 
to a knowledge of “the beyond that is within.” But 
we cannot do this without facing another problem. 
As long as the theologian remains in the skies his task 
is fairly simple. He works out his system of ideas 
at will and there is no one to say him nay, for there 
is nothing by which to check his conclusions. It is 
quite different when we think of God as near and 
relate him to his world. For now we are entering a 
realm which is shared by others, and in which we 
must relate our faith to concrete facts. Natural 
science is here, and history and psychology and the 
plain facts of human experience. How fares now 
this idea of a God that is all-good and all-powerful 
in face of the evil and irrational in the world? Can 
we think of providence and the reign of natural law. 
at the same time? Can we reconcile our faith in 
“one increasing purpose” with that seeming tangle of 
unmeaning events which we call history? When men 
say sight, can we say faith? When science says energy, 
can we say spirit? (When it says law, can we say 
providence? Can we see the supernatural when it 
describes the natural? Can we say creation when it 
says evolution? When it says nature, can we see 
God? 

We enter the realm here of the “conflict of science 


36 THE MEANING OF GOD 


and religion,” and we know that so long as science 
and religion are studying and interpreting the selfsame 
world some conflict will be almost inevitable. That 
there should be ultimate conflict is impossible. For 
truth is one, and where truth is found there we find 
God, whether at the hand of science in the world of 
nature or at the hand of faith in the world of spirit. 
It is important too that we remember the distinctly 
different tasks which science and religion set them- 
selves. Science is descriptive of modes of behavior 
in the world of nature. It has no answer for the 
questions “whence the mechanism has come, why it is 
there, whither it is going, and what may or may not 
be beyond and beside it, which our senses are incapable 
of appreciating. These things are not ‘explained’ by 
science and never can be.”® It is just these questions 
for which faith seeks an answer. In case of “con- 
flict” the fault has sometimes lain with the theologian. 
He has often assumed that faith stood or fell with 
the particular form of doctrine in which he expressed 
it. If the facts of science and history contradict some 
form of Biblical statement, then he concludes hastily 
that revelation is denied and religion is gone. If the 
statements of biologist and anthropologist and as- 
tronomer do not square with the pictures of Genesis, 
then the whole idea of creation is in peril. If science 
declares that the human race has come to be by gradual 
development, then he feels that the unique nature of 
man as moral personality is done away; strangely 


6 Sir E. Ray Lankester, quoted by Thomson, “Science and 
Religion,” page 207. 


THE GOD WHO IS NEAR 37 


enough that idea never occurs to him in the case of 
the individual, though he knows that every individual 
is a gradual development from an infinitely small 
germ. Undoubtedly one of the most fruitful sources 
of trouble here is a mechanical conception of inspira- 
tion, insisting upon verbal infallibility and mistaking 
the nature of revelation. Sometimes the scientist has 
been at fault. It was a temptation to assume that his 
world was the only world and his method the only 
method of reaching truth. The temptation to philo- 
sophize and dogmatize is upon us all, and not least 
upon those who are loudest in decrying philosophers. 

It is by no means all loss here, however. Science 
has helped theology. For the spirit of science means 
humility and patience and teachableness. It asks of 
men a reverence for truth and a devotion to it. It 
recalls men constantly to the world of fact, to the 
realities by which our theories must be tested. How 
it has helped to correct old misconceptions and to lead 
to a truer understanding of God’s way with his world 
will appear in our further study. 

We begin with the thought of the nearness of God 
in the world of nature, and first of all as the creative 
God. The older doctrine of creation had little relation 
to the idea of the near God. Through a few suc- 
cessive steps, requiring in all but six days of time, 
God by a fiat of will brings forth the universe. His 
work is like that of a builder, working from without 
and shaping forth his objects one after the other. 
Now the question involved here is something far more 
than the order of appearances in Genesis and geology, 


38 THE MEANING OF GOD 


or the matter of whether we are dealing with six days 
or six epochs. It is not, of course, a matter of crea- 
tion versus evolution. For whether the world sprang 
into being at some word of power, or came by long 
processes of development, the question would still re- 
main as to its source, and the answer of faith would 
still be, “In the beginning God created.” It is the 
question of how this creative Power has worked, and 
back of that the question of the nature of the universe 
itself. 

The old idea of the world was static, a finished 
world, ordered and fixed and final. For physics there 
were fixed, ultimate particles, the atoms, of which all 
things were made. For chemistry there was a definite 
set of elements, themselves unchanging, however they 
might combine. In the world of life there was a 
similar order of species and genera that had been from 
all time. The same idea held in the social realm with 
the fixed institutions of family and state and property, 
and the fixed and unchanging social classes, higher and 
lower, into which men fell. Creation was thought of 
as the deed by which once for all this world was 
brought forth. That is behind us to-day. Science has 
given us a dynamic and developing world. We inter- 
pret reality in terms of energy. Activity is being and 
the mode of action is the revelation of the nature of 
a given being. The world that is has come to be 
through a long history of change, and change has not 
ceased with our day. 

Now the first thought of many was that with this 
idea of a developing world the Christian conception of 


THE GOD WHO IS NEAR 39 


creation went by the board. That was true of some 
who welcomed it and some who feared it. Let us 
turn again to this idea of evolution. No idea of 
modern times has had a wider influence, or has been 
more stimulating in all departments of thought, than 
the idea of evolution, and no other has been so vague, 
or so mutually contradictory in its different forms. 
What does evolution mean? Is it a process of unfold- 
ing by which that is brought to light which had 
previously existed though hidden, or is it the actual 
coming into being of something really new? Is it a 
purely mechanical process where all changes are 
wrought by forces working from without, or is it the 
movement of some life force that is continually giving 
birth to new forms of being? Is it mere change with- 
out idea or hope of progress, or is there purpose and 
meaning working to some high end? If we leave aside 
particular theories, like the Darwinian theory of or- 
ganic evolution, then the general idea of evolution 
may be stated thus: That which is has come to be 
by gradual change in a continuous process through 
the orderly working of indwelling forces. And this 
might be further reduced to the two principles, con- 
tinuity and change; that which is involves the ap- 
pearance of something new, but the new always stands 
in relation to the old. All this leaves as many prob- 
lems as it solves. There is no “explanation” here. 
Take the problem of the new. Where does it come 
from? The idea that slight changes may be assumed 
without any ground, or may be gotten rid of with 
the phrase “chance variation,’ is more naive than 


4.0 THE MEANING OF GOD 


convincing, and “chance” or ‘‘fortuitous” does not fit 
very well into a discussion where everything is to be 
scientific. And the assumption that the high is not 
really higher, and not really different, because it all 
“developed” from the low, is just a bit of dogmatism. 
Continuity does not mean identity: it means simply 
that when the new appears it is related to the old. 
The new that comes little by little is just as big a 
problem in principle as if a world leaped forth com- 
plete at one stroke. 

The idea then of a dynamic and developing world 
does not for a moment remove the ground for the 
thought of a creative God, but it certainly gives a 
different form to that conception. First of all we see 
creation as the work of an indwelling God. We think 
of the world no longer in terms of inert things that 
are being made and shaped, but rather in terms of 
energy and life, an energy that appears in changing 
forms, a life that becomes ever richer and more varied 
as it moves to higher planes. The process by which 
these changes take place is for the scientist as for 
the man of faith an orderly one. The former sums 
them up in terms of natural law; the latter sees in 
them the work of God and knows that all this energy 
and life is the moving Spirit of God. These are but 
two sides of the same reality: 

“A fire mist and a planet— 
A crystal and a cell— 
A jellyfish and a saurian, 
And caves where the cavemen dwell; 


Then a sense of law and beauty, 
And a face turned from the clod— 


THE GOD WHO IS NEAR 41 


Some call it Evolution, 
And others call it God.”7 

In the second place we see creation as a continuous 
process. The method of God is that of growth, or 
development. We see the same process in the shaping 
of the material universe, the growth of a tree, the 
making of human character, the bringing in of that 
new life of humanity which we call the kingdom of 
God. In the creative work on these different levels, 
different forces are brought into play. With the com- 
ing of personal life on earth God brings to bear the 
forces of truth and love, the transforming powers of 
personal fellowship. But it is still a method of growth. 
The new is constantly appearing, not the less wonder- 
ful because each morning becomes a fresh day of crea- 
tion; but the new is always related to the old that 
went before. But, says some one, must we not in the 
name of religion demand that there be at least one 
place where a definite break occurred in this gradual 
development, the place where there appears at last 
man, moral, spiritual, in the image of God? Was 
there not something new and different when man 
came? Certainly there was something new and dif- 
ferent when man appeared, and we must say, as our 
fathers did, that here is a being made in the image 
of God into whom God had breathed the breath of 
life. We may recall too the opinion of certain 
biologists concerning the sudden appearance of marked 
variations, or mutations, which initiate new and per- 
manent forms of life. Only let us keep in mind two 


7W. H. Carruth, “Each in His Own Tongue.” 


42 THE MEANING OF GOD 


other considerations: first, not here alone but at every 
stage God is bringing new life to his world; second, 
at this stage as at all others the new is related to what 
went before and conditioned by it. Why be disturbed 
because man comes thus as the goal of a long process, 
or because we cannot define and date a dramatic mo- 
ment and say, Here the new life appeared? Does not 
the life of each individual man present the same prob- 
lem? Just a few years ago there was an infinitesimal 
germ. Step by step it grew. No moment was greatly 
different from what went before. At no time could 
you say, This is the great moment, here is a moral 
personality in the likeness of God. And yet the fact 
remains, the man is here. 

Certainly this idea of creation is far more vital 
and involves an even loftier conception of God. He is 
no longer the distant God who, from his place re- 
moved, creates worlds and sends them spinning 
through space; he is indwelling spirit whose life moves 
in all. Nor is creation the easy fiat of sheer power 
that works without cost to itself. The great Spirit 
lives with men, fills his world, gives himself to it in 
ever-increasing measure, bringing forth out of himself 
its wonderful life of order and beauty and meaning, 
until at last he brings forth man to whom he gives 
in the fellowship of love and truth that measure of 
his life which no lesser being can share, 

The relation of this indwelling God to the world 
of nature has been sufficiently indicated in the fore- 
going discussion. It is one of the points at which 
modern science has been of help to us. For modern 


THE GOD WHO IS NEAR 43 


science has compelled us to think of this universe not 
in terms of fixed forms and dead matter, which a 
carpenter God might have made and set apart from 
himself, but in terms of energy and life. In sucha 
world, God becomes either the power that moves in 
all and sustains all, or he is pushed out of the universe 
as a helpless and useless figure. There is something 
greatly appealing in such a conception as this. Words- 
worth gives evidence of its meaning to the poet as 
he writes, 


“Of something far more deeply interfused, 
Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns, 
And the round ocean, and the living air, 
And the blue sky, and in the mind of man; 
A. motion and a spirit, that impels 
All thinking things, all objects of all thought, 
And rolls through all things.” § 


But this conception by itself is very vague and is 
far from reaching the Christian position. This may 
be pantheism, identifying God with the world-all. It 
may reduce itself to the idea of a Life Force, coming 
perhaps to a transitory consciousness in man. It may 
mean a pure naturalism, where the energy is never 
more than impersonal and its action always mechanical. 
Is this immanent Force spiritual or mechanical? Is 
it personal or impersonal? Is it ethical? Does it give 
reality to individual being and any place for freedom? 
It must be definitely realized that the dynamic concep- 
tion of the universe and the philosophic or poetic con- 
ception of immanence are far from giving us the full 


8 “Lines Above Tintern Abbey.” 


44 THE MEANING OF GOD 


Christian meaning of the God that is near. Something 
more is needed than to declare that “God is immanent 
so far as he is the pervasive principle or energy by 
which the creative process is carried forward.” * The 
nearness for which the Christian conception of God 
distinctly stands is a’nearness that is personal, ethical, 
and redemptive. 

God is the personal being of love and good-will 
who draws near to men for their help; this is the 
distinctively religious as against the more philosophical 
conception of immanence. ‘This is the higher im- 
manence, the immanence which is possible only in the 
realm of personal being.*® God as sustaining energy 
can dwell in all being, lowest and highest; but the near- 
ness of personal fellowship is possible only with per- 
sons. There is a physical nearness, as we all know, 
where bodies may touch each other and souls may 
still be worlds apart. It is not enough for the Christian 
man to believe in a God who has beset him behind 
and before and laid his hand upon him, nor yet in a 
God in whom he lives and moves and has his being. 
In a measure that is true of the air that we breathe; 
but the heart of man cries out for a living God, for 
a God who knows and cares and draws near with a 
purpose of love, a God to whom a man may lift his 
face and say, “Our Father.” 

Only on this level can we see the higher creative 
work of God, the work that we usually call redemp- 
tion. Here again is something more than shaping and 


® Beckwith, “The Idea of God,” page 260. 
10 See McConnell, “The Diviner Immanence.” 


THE GOD WHO IS NEAR A5 


sustaining energy; here is Person drawing near to 
person, here are goodness and righteousness calling 
for answering trust and obedience, here is love that 
asks for love in turn. Whether we emphasize the 
more negative side and call this redemption, or the 
more positive aspect and name it creation, here is a 
work that can be done only on this plane of the higher 
and personal nearness. And here one sees the weak- 
ness of so many modern cults from Christian Science 
to the varying forms of “New Thought’; with all 
their emphasis on the reality of the spiritual and its 
nearness, they miss the clear apprehension of this 
higher nearness that is personal and ethical. And the 
correlate of this failure is the equal failure to appre- 
ciate sin as the wrong personal and moral attitude 
on man’s part which can block the work of the God 
who thus draws near. Here we get the larger mean- 
ing of the Incarnation of God in Christ, not as some 
single irruption of the divine into our humanity, but 
as the supreme deed of that God who ever dwells 
with men as Jesus did, hating the evil and loving the 
good, toiling with us and for us, calling us into that 
fellowship which is life’s greatest creative spiritual 
force, suffering with us and for us. Here belongs also 
the Christian conception of God as indwelling Spirit, 
who enters into human life by way of this fellowship 
as the new and true life of man. But these aspects 
we must consider more in detail in the study of the 
democracy of God, and of God as Spirit. 

We have seen that the Christian conception of the 
far God involves the idea of a God of moral 


46 THE MEANING OF GOD 


transcendence, the righteous and holy God before 
whom men bow in worship. The moral character of 
God is equally involved in this thought of the God 
who is near. The burden of the New Testament is 
clear; we know God as the good God because he draws 
near in mercy to save. God, says Jesus, is like the 
shepherd looking for his sheep, like the father going 
out to meet the wayward son. “God was in Christ,” 
says Paul, in a summary of his gospel, “reconciling 
the world unto himself.” ** And the Old Testament 
in the same way finds the character of God revealed 
in the goodness with which he chose Israel and led 
her and blessed her; ‘‘When Israel was a child, then 
I loved him, and called my son out of Egypt.” *? The 
character of loving good will is the necessary condi- 
tion of such a fellowship, of this nearness of God 
and man. In the end it is love alone which can over- 
come that “salt, unplumbed, estranging sea” which 
divides person from person, love which gives itself to 
the other, love which finds its life in the other, love 
which evokes love from the other.7* “Nowhere is 
there a fuller consciousness of the Personality and of 
the distinction from one another of the persons 
concerned than there is in love. Yet just here, in 
proportion to the greatness and the depth of the love, 
such mutual exclusiveness is transcended and done 
aia yo 


112 Corinthians v. Io. 

12 Hosea xi. I. 

18D’Arcy, “God and the Struggle for Existence,” page 45. 
14 Webb, “God and Personality,” page 148. 


THE GOD WHO IS NEAR 47 


It is from this side, that of the nearness of God 
in fellowship and good will, that we have the religious 
approach to the idea of the personality of God. True, 
the conception of personality is also involved in 
the idea of the far God; God is not merely in his 
world, he is always more than his world, above 
his world. But it is in the thought of a God who 
thus draws near, as we have just seen, that the 
conception of God as personal is most clearly involved. 
And it is important that this demand of religion be 
clearly seen and be distinguished from philosophical 
considerations. Professor Pratt points out that there 
is in all religion a “social attitude” of the worshiper 
toward the object of his worship.** Certainly that is 
true of Christianity, and the social attitude involves 
clearly the thought of God as one so like ourselves 
that we may have fellowship with him. God’s attitude 
is social, and not merely our own. He draws near 
with conscious purpose, with good will, and asks a 
personal response from us. 

It is not terms with which we are concerned here, 
it is not necessary for us to use the word “person” ; 
but the matter involved is for us of vital import. What 
we are concerned with, as C. C. J. Webb has pointed 
out, is “the capacity of finite persons for what can 
only be called a personal relation to the Supreme 
Reality—and therefore the presence in the Supreme 
Reality of whatever is necessary for the existence of 
such a relation thereto.” *® There is no special per- 


15 Pratt, “The Religious Consciousness,” pages 2, 3. 
16 “God and Personality,” pages 128, 129. 


48 THE MEANING OF GOD 


tinence in pointing out, as Mr. Webb does elsewhere,*” 
that the term “person” was first used in theology, not 
for God but for inner-trinitarian distinctions, or in 
suggesting, as Kirsopp Lake does, that we search the 
Hebrew and Greek of Biblical times in vain for this 
term. There is little use in haggling over terms when 
there is so clearly-present in the religion of the Old 
as of the New Testament that which religion demands, 
—namely, a conscious, purposive God of good will 
between whom and man a mutual fellowship ig pos- 
sible. What we are concerned with is not what Augus- 
tine had in mind in using tres persone for the Trinity. 
That the substance can be present without the term 
is indicated by what Harnack says: “So strongly was 
Augustine filled with the feeling, never of course 
clearly formulated, that God was person, whom one 
was to trust and love, that this certainty was even a 
hidden guide for his trinitarian speculations.” ** 

It does not lie in the scope of this discussion to 
consider the philosophical objections to the idea of 
God as personal being. They rest largely upon the 
idea that divine personality necessarily involves the 
limitedness and separateness that we have in human 
persons. The significance of this idea for our social 
faith can only be suggested, and yet it is absolutely 
fundamental. Back of the social struggles of to-day 
are two opposed world views. For one the supreme 
value lies in things, and the supreme rule is, Let him 
seize who can. For the other the supreme value lies 


17“God and Personality,” pages 61, 62. 
18 Dogmengeschichte, III, 109, IIo. 


THE GOD WHO IS NEAR 49 


in persons, and the supreme rule is that of a loving 
service which will further this personal, or human, 
life. The form which this opposition takes in the 
social questions of to-day needs no illustration, but 
we should make clear to ourselves what the opposed 
philosophies, or faiths, are which underlie this social 
conflict. Plainly those who stand for social justice, 
for democracy, for humanity, cannot permanently 
maintain their position except as it rests back upon 
the conviction that the universe is organized on their 
side, that the World Ground is personal and moral, 
that there is a personal God. 

Many voices in our day are giving moving expres- 
sion to this thought of the God that is near to men. 
Not least among these is the Indian poet and mystic, 
Rabindranath Tagore, one of whose poems may 
furnish a close for this discussion. The closing lines 
suggest the theme of our next chapter: 


“Leave this chanting and singing and telling of beads! Whom 
dost thou worship in this lonely dark corner of a temple 
with doors all shut? Open thine eyes and see thy God is 
not before thee! 


“He is there where the tiller is tilling the hard ground and 
where the pathmaker is breaking stones. He is with them 
in sun and in shower, and his garment is covered with dust. 
Put thy holy mantle and even like him come down on the 
dusty soil! 


“Deliverance? Where is this deliverance to be found? Our 
master himself has joyfully taken upon him the bonds of 
creation; he is bound with us all forever. 


50 THE MEANING OF GOD 


“Come out of thy meditations and leave aside thy flowers and 
incense! What harm is there if thy clothes become tattered 
and stained? Meet him and stand by him in toil and in 
sweat of thy brow.” 19 


NOTES 


The idea of development is, of course, a very ancient one. The 
difference which modern science has made is in the attempt to 
describe the laws and define the order by which this development 
takes place, in some instances to reduce it to a mechanical 
process. For Augustine creation was not the production at once 
of all the completed forms of life, but the bringing forth of a 
world in which all the potencies of this higher life were present, 
these to appear then through the ages. He suggests to us Tyn- 
dall’s famous phrase, “the promise and potency of all terrestrial 
life.’ Note his “Fragments of Science,” II, 191. So also Dar- 
win, when he speaks of “life, with its several powers, having 
been originally breathed by the Creator into a few forms or 
into one.” See the closing words of his “Origin of Species.” 
Augustine’s view is apparently approved by Thomas Aquinas. 
See Simpson, “The Spiritual Interpretation of Nature,” pages 
382, 383, for quotations from both. Very striking are certain pas- 
sages in the notable “Outline of Science” which John Wesley 
prepared for his day and published under the title, “A Survey 
of the Wisdom of God in Creation.” It appeared in many edi- 
tions, the following quotations being from the Philadelphia 
edition of 1816, volume IJ. Mr. Wesley writes that the universe 
is “no less one in succession than in codrdination” (page 188). 
“There is a prodigious number of continued links between the 
most perfect man and the ape” (page 213). “By what degrees 
does nature raise herself up to man? How will she rectify this 
head that is always inclined toward the earth? How change 
these paws into flexible arms? What method will she make 
use of to transform these crooked feet into supple and skillful 
hands? ... The ape is this rough draft of man: this rude 
sketch, an imperfect representation, which nevertheless bears a 
resemblance to him, and is the last creature that serves to dis- 
play the admirable progression of the works of God” (page 


19 “Gitanjali,” 11. 


THE GOD WHO IS NEAR 51 


210). It might be added that modern science does not trace 
man’s descent from the ape. 


The idea of personality has been one of slow development, the 
reason for which is to be found more in social life and social 
ethics than in philosophy or theology. The idea could not come 
to clear realization until men saw more plainly the quality and 
value of human life, and so of each human being, as personal. 
That realization came along the Hebrew-Christian line, not along 
that of Greek thought or life, though Stoicism moved in that 
direction. Where Greek thought dominated, there the signifi- 
cance of this idea of personality in relation to God, and the 
thought of religion as a personal-ethical relation, suffered. The 
earlier thought of personality identified it too much with the 
idea of individuality, tending to make it a principle of individu- 
ation, instead of realizing that personality is a quality of life 
which individuals share rather than that which makes them dif- 
ferent. The stress was laid upon person conceived as individual 
rather than upon the quality of being involved in personality. 
This defect is illustrated by Webb in chapter II and in the 
article, “Person,” in “The Catholic Encyclopedia,” with the defi- 
nition of Boethius quoted in both places: “A person is an indi- 
vidual substance of rational nature.” 


IIT 
THE DEMOCRACY OF GOD 


Our constant effort in these studies has been to see 
the nature of God through his relation to his world 
and the meaning of God for the life of the world. 
This is distinctively the Christian method of knowing 
God as over against speculative philosophy on the one 
hand or dogmatic theology on the other. A theology 
which does not come from life ig an ill-founded specu- 
lation; a theology which does not look out upon life 
is a useless abstraction. From such considerations in 
times past men have drawn the conclusion that we 
must have a theology of experience. Individual ex- 
perience, subjective experience, is indeed important; 
but human experience is larger than that, and the 
world in which we are to find God and for which 
God has meaning is larger than that. In the last two 
lectures we have taken into account some of those 
changes in human experience which we express in 
terms of science: a universe whose boundaries have 
been pushed back inconceivably far in terms of time, 
of space, and of the infinitely small; a universe with 
the earth dislodged from its old place as central and 
supreme; a static world changed to one in which we 

52 


THE DEMOCRACY OF GOD 53 


seek to understand everything in terms of energy and 
of development; a world of universal order. 

These changes largely concern the world of nature. 
But there is another world, and religion is supremely 
concerned with this; that is the world of human 
_ nature, individual and social. To that world, especially 
on its social side, we now turn. What is the relation 
of God to this associated life of men, the life which 
men live together in home and community and indus- 
try and state? What is God’s method with men in 
this life? What character does he here reveal? What 
is his significance here? 

To answer these questions rightly we must consider 
the changes that have been taking place in this social 
world, and note their bearing upon our idea of God. 
If there has been a revolution in our conception of 
the natural world, a thoughtful consideration will 
show an almost equally revolutionary change in this 
world of social life and institution, a change which 
is still in process. However briefly and inadequately 
done, the main significance of this change must be 
brought out for the purpose of this study. We will 
consider first the change of social condition, then the 
change in social ideal or thought. 

The change in social condition or organization is a 
commonplace to students. Woodrow Wilson gave it 
effective statement when he said: “Yesterday, and 
ever since history began, men were related to one 
another as individuals. ... To-day the everyday 
relationships of men are largely with great impersonal 
concerns, with organizations, not with other individual 


54 THE MEANING OF GOD 


men. Now this is nothing short of a new social age, 
a new era of human relationship, a new stage-setting 
of the drama of life.”’* These words Graham Wallas 
puts at the head of his great discussion of this theme 
in his book, “The Great Society.”’ Science, invention 
and engineering have done their work. Steam, steel, 
and capital have been principal agents. The industrial 
revolution is a name given to one aspect of the great 
change. The results are plain; human life is bound 
together so intricately, so closely, with such com- 
plexity, as to have wrought a social revolution in the 
hie or theirace, 

The industrial side is, of course, fundamental. Once 
we had literally manufacture, “hand-making,” now 
we have machine-making. That simple change has 
brought vast aggregates of capital into the control 
of a few, masses of population living together, diver- 
sification of industry, nations facing each other in 
economic rivalry which is always threatening to break 
out in war, while at the same time these nations are 
dependent one upon the other, each in the end suffer- 
ing or advancing with the rest. Economically the 
world is one to-day, though we have not yet learned 
how to draw the conclusion and move from rivalry 
to cooperation. 

Quite as significant is the change in the field of 
human intercourse. Even so late as the first years 
of this republic, men debated the wisdom of adding 
territories to the West, since it would make a country 
so large that its parts could not act together and so 


1“The New Freedom,” pages 6, 7. 


THE DEMOCRACY OF GOD 55 


could not come under one government. Distance and 
mountains and seas were great barriers then; there 
are no barriers now. There have always been migra- 
tions of humankind when the pressure of need or the 
lust of conquest was felt; but on the whole they were 
at long intervals, and comparatively slow in move- 
ment. In our day we have seen a tide of a million 
people from a score of lands around the globe flowing 
into this country year after year. The intercourse 
of mind made possible by modern invention and made 
necessary by industry and politics has been even more 
striking. Telegraph, telephone, wireless, radio—these 
have already become commonplace; but we have not 
begun to measure their meaning in making the world 
one community, nor yet the influence of that air travel 
of which we see as yet only the infancy. It may be 
that we have here the conditions in the making which 
will at last compel a common speech for humankind. 
With the change in industry and the change in inter- 
course, though more slowly, there have come the 
political changes. World empires have long been 
known in history, but they were largely external, im- 
posed from without, a matter of conquest on the one 
hand and of taxes on the other. What we see to-day 
is a world trying to find some way in which to express 
in political union the needs and the facts of that com- 
mon life that is already here and the larger communal 
world life that is waiting to be born. 

This, however, we must note clearly: there is a big 
difference between union and unity. Classes and races 
and nations have been thrown together, but so far 


56 THE MEANING OF GOD 


we do not know whether out of it is to come a richer 
common life or a strife that will end in common de- 
struction. The first result in all these spheres has 
been conflict: class against class in the industrial world, 
race prejudice and bitterness unknown in the days 
when in the main each race lived within given bounds, 
and the clash of nation with nation in economic rivalry 
and devastating wars. 

Here is a life clamant in its demand upon religion, 
desperate in its need of religion. Social humanity is 
somewhat in the plight of one of those unfortunates 
with the strength and the passions of a man, and the 
mentality and morality of a child. And the danger 
from the moron in a community is only a suggestion 
of the danger of this stage of human life. We have 
conquered the forces of nature, we have multiplied our 
wants, we have released all manner of passions, even 
fostering some of them behind high names like 
patriotism and religion; but we have not learned wis- 
dom and love and unselfishness and self-control and 
brotherhood in our communal life. And the Church 
is not blameless, the Church which has too often stood 
aside with an interest limited to the single soul and 
the life beyond, which has had no clear and command- 
ing word about such great matters as war and social 
justice, and no great message about the meaning of 
God for these new tides of life such as the prophets 
had when they saw Jehovah in the life of Israel. 

But now we must turn from social facts to social 
ideals. Such tremendous changes cannot go on with- 
out men concerning themselves as to their underlying 


THE DEMOCRACY OF GOD 6? 


meaning and the moral ideals which should obtain in 
them. At the risk of the charge of over-simplification, 
let me select two social attitudes for purpose of 
description and contrast. That neither of these is 
ordinarily seen or stated in its full meaning does not 
alter the fact of their presence and profound influence 
in human society. They are indeed the rival social 
faiths competing for our suffrage to-day. 

We may call the one the pagan faith, It can be 
stated very briefly. First, it believes that the highest 
values are material. The test of individual success 
is property and power; the goal of a nation is material 
well-being, extension of territory, balance of trade, 
command of markets and raw materials. Second, its 
rule of life is selfishness. In business its supreme 
appeal is to the motive of profit; it can conceive of 
no industry not based upon such an appeal and of no 
government acting from any motive except that of in- 
dividual advantage. It has such mottoes as “Deutsch- 
land ueber Alles,’ and “America first, last, and all 
the time.” As Bernard Shaw suggests, it is very ready 
to sing, 


“Britons never shall be slaves,” 


but it is not at all averse to Britons being masters, 
or to making sure that Britannia rules the waves. 
Third, its dependence is upon force and cunning, and 
these are its gods. It may have its chaplains and 
prayers for formal occasions, and in the old days 
when it formed “holy alliances” it put pious phrases 
in the treaties which were instruments of theft and 


58 THE MEANING OF GOD 


oppression; but at heart it is quite convinced that “God 
is on the side of the heaviest battalions.” In the indus- 
trial world the combination of selfishness and force 
takes other forms, but the principle upon which it 
- holds secure a position of mastery is the same. Ma- 
terialism, selfishness, and militarism—these are the 
three marks of paganism as a social creed. 
- To call the opposing position democracy may invite 
-misunderstanding and criticism, especially if I go on 
to express the conviction that democracy rightly con- 
ceived is the expression of the Christian ideal in social 
relations. Nominally democracy represents the ideals 
of the American republic. In some of its larger mean- 
ings it received a noble exposition from Woodrow 
Wilson during the Great War, and a great deal of 
lip service from others who were following very dif- 
ferent ideals at heart. In these years of cynicism and 
selfishness which have been the aftermath of the war 
it has been meeting a great deal of opposition from 
the most diverse of quarters, some of it outspoken, 
much of it veiled. Soviet Russia, “hundred per cent” 
patriots, the safe and sane business man who insists ‘ 
that we stand for republicanism and not democracy, 
the neo-aristocrats, whether scholars like McDougall 
or pamphleteers like Lathrop Stoddard, emancipated 
individualists like H. G. Mencken, the Nordic prophets 
with their new plan of world salvation, fundamentalist 
proclaimers of divine autocracy, Fascism abroad and 
its counterpart here, that latest misguided organization 
which compounds secrecy and reliance on force, and 
calls it Americanism—this strangely mixed company 


THE DEMOCRACY OF GOD 59 


is one in being either frankly opposed to democracy 
or skeptical of it. Despite all this, democracy repre- 
sents in its varied aspects the greatest social movement 
of modern times, not often clearly understood, appear- 
ing in many different forms, yet representing in the 
minds of thoughtful men the only way out for 
humanity. 

There is evident need here of analysis and definition, 
for it must be confessed that democracy is like the 
word “evolution” in being widely acclaimed, of large 
influence, and yet having very different meanings even 
for its followers. Let it be said first that democracy 
as here used means something far more than a form 
of political organization. It might better be described 
as a form of social faith concerned with the assertion 
of human values and the ways in which these are to 
be achieved. The first of its underlying principles 
is the sacredness of human personality. The end of 
government is the welfare of men; the test of the good 
state is to be found in the kind of life that it fosters. 
If a conflict of interest comes between property or 
vested rights or any other special interest on the one 
hand, and human welfare on the other, there is only 
one choice for democracy. And human personality 
means here not a particular group or class or kind, 
not a hereditary nobility or a Nordic race or a white 
breed or the bearers of a certain culture; it includes 
all men as men. Democracy does not, indeed, mean 
a leveling down; it can make room for those differ- 
ences between men which are obvious to all. But it 
counts as more significant the fact of the common 


60 THE MEANING OF GOD 


humanity which unites than it does the differences 
that distinguish individuals or races. It insists that 
human beings as such, of every age and sex and race 
and kind, form one class, and that not the least mem- 
ber of this humankind should ever be treated as tool 
or property or mere means for some other who may 
be stronger or more cunning. 

The second principle of democracy is that of free- 
dom. Freedom it counts a good in itself. By freedom 
it means not anarchy nor license, but man’s determina- 
tion of his own life in the light of ideals of truth and 
right. Such a life, and only such a life, is in the full 
sense human. For that reason men are not content, 
when once awakened, with the most benevolent 
autocracy, though it assure them work and bread and 
peace. For that reason the concern of labor in indus- 
try is seen to be something more than wages and hours. 
The ideal which Christianity asserts for man’s indi- 
vidual moral and religious life is held to obtain in the 
state and in industry. 

Democracy here does not of course mean town meet- 
ing methods rule by the mob, or even the idea of a 
majority vote deciding all the details of political life. 
It does not exclude representative institutions of gov- 
ernments like those of Great Britain and the United 
States. It does involve the idea that in the important 
concerns of life represented by the state, the rank and 
file of men are to have a voice in determining what 
the conditions of their life shall be. Nothing more 
clearly illustrates this than the realization of the swift 
change in relation to the attitude toward war. But 


THE DEMOCRACY OF GOD 61 


a little while ago the decision of war, affecting for 
life and death and for the welfare of posterity millions 
~upon millions, could be made by a small group of men, 
or could be rendered an inevitable event by processes 
of diplomacy which were hidden often from all but 
two or three of even those in charge of government. 
The tide of democracy has changed that radically in 
only a few years. That same determination of the 
common man to help shape the conditions under which 
he must live is at the beginning of even more sig- 
nificant development in the social-industrial world. 

The third principle is that of solidarity. Individual- 
ism is not democracy. Individual life is achieved only 
in social relations. Humanity is not a sum of units; 
it is an organism, to use the figure of Paul, a body. 
In the still better picture of Jesus, it is a family, a 
brotherhood. The whole is concerned with the wel- 
fare of each part, and each individual lives his real 
life only in and through the whole. 

And finally democracy is a faith. It is a faith in 
men. Nota sentimental idealization of humanity; you . 
cannot add ignorance to ignorance and get wisdom, 
or unite a mass of selfish individuals and get a com- 
mon spirit of devotion to high ends. The voice of 
the people is not the voice of God. But democracy 
is the faith that the whole of men can better be trusted 
to govern themselves, than we can trust one man or 
a few to have absolute power over their fellows. It 
is the belief that in the end, if there be education and 
a chance to know the truth and a full discussion of 
issues, the common people will find their way to what 


62 THE MEANING OF GOD 


is just and right. And that involves a deeper faith, 
the faith in truth and justice themselves. For in the 
end there are only two forces upon which we may 
depend for securing peace and order and a chance to 
live. The one force is physical and external; the 
autocracies of the world have depended upon this from 
of old. The other force is moral, rational, spiritual; 
upon this democracy relies. It believes that if truth 
be given a full opportunity it will make its way in 
the end. It believes that what is fair and just will 
in the end win the suffrage of men. It holds there- 
fore to education and to the fullest freedom of thought 
and speech, not blind to the danger that lies in these, 
realizing fully how long the road will be and what 
errors will come by the way, but knowing also that no 
other road can lead to the goal and believing that the 
final victory is sure. 

Even those who differ from these positions will 
admit that democracy, thus interpreted, represents the 
great social movement of modern times, and that the 
convictions that underlie it are to be distinguished 
from various efforts and experiments to give it expres- 
sion in government, industry, and other forms of life, 
including international relations. 

Fourth, democracy stands for authority, but for 
authority of a particular kind. It is true it rejects 
arbitrary and autocratic authority, but democracy is 
impossible without a rule, as is liberty itself. Nor 
is the final authority in democracy the will of the 
majority as is so often assumed. The will of the 
majority may be irrational, tyrannical, and utterly sub- 


THE DEMOCRACY OF GOD 63 


versive of democracy. There can be only one ultimate 
authority for democracy and that is the authority of 
what is true and just. It is the task and obligation 
of the people to discover this and to incorporate it in 
law; they do not of themselves make it. And in no 
other government is the very life of the state dependent 
upon such recognition of authority as in a democracy. 
As James Bryce put it in the closing chapter of his 
“Modern Democracies’: “Governments that have 
ruled by Force and Fear have been able to live without 
moral sanctions or to make their subjects believe that 
those sanctions consecrated them, but no free govern- 
ment has ever yet so lived and thriven.” 

Fifth, democracy involves the principle of obliga- 
tion. It is true that the popular idea makes of 
democracy a kind of a universal struggle for rights, 
or a system by which rights are assured to all. But 
the selfish demands of innumerable individuals would 
never make a social order. There can be no individual 
rights without a common righteousness, and unless 
the individual is obligated to maintain that righteous- 
ness it cannot exist fora moment. So far from asking 
less, democracy demands more than any other form 
of government. And its principle of obligation is 
noblesse oblige; we owe in the measure in which we 
poss¢ss. Democracy rests not upon self-assertion, but 
on self-devotion. 

We are dealing here with a fundamental way of 
looking at life. What is the relation between this 
and Christianity? What does all this mean for our 
idea of God and his relation to the world? The ques- 


64 THE MEANING OF GOD 


tion of democracy, thus conceived, is one not simply 
for ethics but for theology. 

From the standpoint of traditional theology, es- 
pecially of the Augustinian-Calvinistic type, it must 
be said that Christianity has not much place for 
democracy. The relation of God to the world cannot 
be conceived on any such lines. God is not simply 
King, but an autocratic King, conceived in terms of 
Oriental despotisms. It is not that benevolence is ex- 
cluded—the most absolute autocracy does not involve 
that—but the Institutes make abundantly plain that 
where power conflicts with moral ideal, even the ideal 
revealed in Jesus Christ, it is power that must be 
asserted. “Like the Scottist theologians with whom 
it is most natural to compare him, Calvin finds the 
essence of deity in will, and his supreme glory in the 
power of unrestricted choice.”? From this flows 
naturally the idea of a static society organized along 
the lines of authority and submission, the authority 
descending from God to the kings ordained by him, 
the supreme Christian duty being unquestioning sub- 
mission. And this applied to evil kings as well as 
the good. “The most iniquitous kings,’ says Calvin, 
“are appointed by the same decree which establishes 
all regal authority.’ The idea of resistance or revolu- 
tion is naturally out of place. In case of wickedness 
and oppression, we are to “call up the remembrance 
of our faults,” and then “reflect that it belongs not 
to us to cure these evils, that all that remains for us 


2 William Adams Brown, American Journal of Theology, X, 
392. 


THE DEMOCRACY OF GOD 65 


is to implore the help of the Lord, in whose hands 
are the hearts of kings, and inclinations of king- 
doms.”* And as late as 1924 a committee of one 
of the largest Protestant bodies of this country re- 
ported at its national convention: “To declare un- 
equivocally that war is sin is to say that the powers 
that declare war are not ordained of God.” 

The modern fundamentalist-premillennialist posi- 
tion is all on this side. The confident hopes of modern 
democracy concerning self-government are all doomed 
to disappointment, we are told.* But beyond that the 
Christian ideal is that of a theocratic absolutism. “The 
American system of government is based on the prin- 
ciple, ‘Governments receive their just powers from the 
consent of the governed’—which principle is false. 
Governments derive their just powers from God. 
Democracy is the antithesis of autocracy—God’s :deal 
of government.” * 

On the other side voices are raised which declare 
that democracy excludes Christianity, at least in any 
traditional form. “Loyalty to God,” says a recent 
writer on “The Religion of the Social Passion,” “is 
disloyalty to humanity.” The opposition to religion 
on the part of Sovietism in Russia and at least of the 
older socialism of Germany is well known. Religion 
for them, not without ground in their experience, was 

3“Tnstitutes,” Book IV, Chapter XX, pages 27, 20. 

4S. B. Kellogg, Bibliotheca Sacra, XLV, 273, 274. 

5 From a letter in the Christian Workers Magazine, official 
organ of the Moody Bible School. The editor approves: ‘“We 


agree that, scripturally viewed, the basis on which our govern- 
ment rests is false.” 


66 THE MEANING OF GOD 


simply a sanction given to the ruling powers and 
groups of privilege. With the same interpretation of 
Christianity, Bertrand Russell assumes that it has lost 
its hold upon the modern man, and declares: “If a 
religious view of life and the world is ever to recon- 
quer the thoughts and feelings of freeminded men and 
women, much that we are accustomed to associate 
with religion will have to be discarded. The first and 
greatest change that is required is to establish a 
morality of initiative, not a morality of submission, 
a morality of hope rather than of fear, of things to 
be done rather than left undone. . . . The religious 
life that we must seek will be inspired with a vision 
of what life may be, and will be happy with the joy 
of creation, living in a large free world of initiative 
and hope.” ® 

These two sides, then, agree at this point, that 
Christianity and democracy exclude each other. Are 
they not, however, both at fault in their understanding 
of the terms involved? ‘Traditional Christianity, both 
as institution and doctrine, has tended to the autocratic, 
but religion in the terms of the prophets and of Jesus 


6In “Principles of Social Reconstruction”; quoted by Mat- 
thews, “Studies in Christian Philosophy,” pages 70, 71. Compare 
William James, “A Pluralistic Universe,” pages 27, 30: “The 
older monarchical theism is obsolete or obsolescent. The place 
of the divine in the world must be more organic and intimate.” 
With the theistic view, he declares, “Man, being an outsider 
and a mere subject to God, not his intimate partner, a character 
of externality invades the field. God is not heart of our heart, 
and reason of our reason, but our magistrate, rather; and me- 
chanically to obey his commands, however strange they may be, 
remains our only moral duty.” 


THE DEMOCRACY OF GOD 67 


shows a different situation. As to democracy, if the 
Church is to maintain its moral leadership, it must 
understand and appreciate, as it has not yet done, the 
significance of this movement. We may leave names 
to one side, we may choose some other word than 
“democracy” or leave it unnamed; but we must face 
the fact that there has been a movement of thought 
as significant for the realm of social life and values 
as evolution has been in biology or Copernicanism in 
our thought of the heavens, There is no phase of 
our modern life, political, industrial, family, interna- 
tional, interracial where the ferment of the new ideals 
is not working. The Church in fact is being pro- 
foundly influenced here. It sees that here is an expres- 
sion of its vital concern, moral ideals and human 
values, and that these ideals and values are the fruitage 
and formulation of the Christian spirit. But the 
Church must do something more; it must furnish this 
movement its basic faith, its underlying conception 
of God and the world. In so doing, its traditional 
autocratic conception of God will be affected, but it 
will find richer meanings in the idea of God and it 
will give truer expression to the faith of the prophets 
and of Jesus. Our discussion of the democracy of 
God will be in line with the principles of democracy 
as suggested above. 

For the God of the Christains, as for democracy, 
the sacredness of humanity is fundamental. The God 
of the prophets and of Jesus is a God who cares for 
men, His supreme concern is righteousness; and 
righteousness igs not obedience to arbitrary rules, it 


68 THE MEANING OF GOD 


is first of all justice between man and man. The 
service which he desires is not fasting and offerings, 
but a service rendered to men: “Cease to do evil; learn 
to do well; seek justice, relieve the oppressed, judge 
the fatherless, plead for the widow.’”’* For Jesus men 
were not worms of the earth, they were children of 
God and of infinite worth. A single soul outweighed 
in value the whole earth. God was concerned with 
the very least of these, so that the man who did injury 
even to a little child might better be drowned in the 
depths of the sea.° And this principle of reverence 
for human personality is not simply one which God 
imposes, but one which he himself obeys. He does 
not use men as things or treat them as puppets. He 
speaks to them as beings of his own kind: “Son of 
man,” he says, “stand upon thy feet.” ‘Come now, 
and let us reason together.”” And each one has value 
for him and a claim upon him, as does the lost sheep 
with the shepherd, or the errant son with his father. 
Such a faith, need it be said, is humanity’s first Magna 
Charta of freedom. Over against all the autocracies 
of the past and the oppressions of the present, against 
the aristocracies with which men lift themselves above 
their fellows, there stands this God who counts all 
men his children and who declares, ‘I am for men.” 
Second, for this God of ours freedom represents 
both goal and method in his work with men. How 
often have men thought that religion meant suppres- 


7 Isaiah i. 16, 17. 
8 Mark viii. 36. 
8 Mark ix. 42. 


THE DEMOCRACY OF GOD 69 


sion, subordination, subjection, a sacrifice somewhere 
of mind or will, of beauty or truth or freedom. And 
so they have set their humanisms against religion and 
have pleaded for the chance of a free and full human 
life. And there has been some ground for this mis- 
take. There have always been those who have thought 
of Christianity as an institution to which men must 
submit, a matter of rules or ritual or organization 
claiming a right to dominate. Not so Jesus. For him 
religion was a life to which he invited men, the life 
of a son, not the submission of a servant. The heart 
of Paul’s great conflict with the Judaizers in the 
Church lay in this same insistence: “For freedom did 
Christ set you free.” *° The goal of God is a free 
humanity, men who believe because the truth of God 
has spoken to their minds, men who love and obey 
because the law is within their hearts, men who have 
found a free life and the fullest life in fellowship 
with God. 

And this free life is the goal not simply for the 
individual but for the group. The old Messianic con- 
ception of the Jews was patterned after the autocracies 
with which men were familiar in that day, and its 
method was not changed by the fact that it was to be 
a benevolent autocracy. The idea survives as a strange 
anachronism in the premillennialism of to-day, but it 
does not represent the Christian thought of to-day any 
more than that of Jesus or Paul. As God lifts man 
higher in the fellowship of truth and love, there will 
be less need for constraint and compulsion and not 


10 Galatians y. I. 


70 THE MEANING OF GOD 


more, less need of scepter and army and force applied 
from without. The goal can be nothing less than a 
humanity which has learned freely and in common 
action to shape all its associated life by the spirit of 
Christ. Ruled by the spirit of truth and justice and 
mercy, with enlightened mind that will at last have 
found the true way, it will mold home and school and 
state and industry according to the will of God. An- 
other world might do for a race of servants, only such 
a world would be a worthy goal for the free sons 
of God. 

But the idea of freedom belongs to the method of 
God as well as to the goal. It is not altogether easy 
to adjust our thinking to this idea. Theology has 
usually begun by simply asserting the absolute power 
of God. “Our God is in the heavens: he hath done 
whatsoever he please.” ** “He commanded, and it 
stood fast.” ** That was all, and that was enough, 
simply to assert the power of God. But there is some- 
thing more than that. There is a mode of action in 
the world of the spirit that corresponds with the prin- 
ciple of order, the reign of law, which now determines 
our conception of the world of nature. You cannot 
get results by compulsion in the realm of the spirit. 
Calvinism, with its sovereign decrees and its irresist- 
ible grace and its total depravity, is the mistaken 
effort along this line. It is true there are certain 
inevitabilities, certain necessities, in the divine order 
of the world, otherwise it would be an irrational uni- 


11 Psalm cxv. 3. 
12 Psalm xxxiil. 9. 


THE DEMOCRACY OF GOD 71 


verse. And there is the plain dependence of man upon 
God. But the highest life can come only by the way 
of freedom. Love is not love except when it is free; 
righteousness is an inner attitude and not an action 
under compulsion. There is only one real goodness 
and that is the goodness of the free spirit. There 
is only one way to character and that is by a free 
loyalty that persistently chooses the right. And that 
determines the method of God. He does not fling 
commandments at men. He does not override the 
will when he offers his grace and help; with a fine 
reverence for the human personality which he has 
made, he says: “Behold, I stand at the door, and 
knock,” ** ‘And in the picture which one great painter 
has made of that scene, the latchstring is on the 
inside. | 

We are coming to realize more deeply to-day the 
significance of this method for the social life, where 
before we thought of it only in relation to the individual. 
Men have dreamed of some single deed, some great 
experience, by which the world might be made over 
into the kingdom of God; they have been slow to learn 
what is the patience and wisdom of God. He does 
not “strive nor cry aloud.” He does not drive. He 
is not a direct actionist. Direct action is a temptation, 
even to the good man and especially the reformer. If 
only we had power with a single blow to wipe out 
every vestige of the liquor traffic, or to destroy the 
last weapon of war! But God does not work that 
way. The appeal of truth to reason, the summons of 


13 Revelation iii, 20. 


72 THE MEANING OF GOD 


right to conscience, the hard tuition of suffering that 
comes when men and nations do wrong, the help that 
comes to those who try, the blessing for those that 
walk the way of justice and mercy—by ways like this 
God has led the race. In a striking paragraph on 
modern English conditions the late Arthur Gleason 
wrote: “God has always granted England time to 
grope. He is a slow and constitutional worker him- 
self, using trial and error. The devil is a fiery revolu- 
tionary.” 

But what of the principle of authority, and where 
is the sovereignty of God? The Christian principle 
of authority abides, but it needs to be understood. The 
heart of the highest religion lies in the fact that man 
finds something which for him is holy—that is, some- 
thing that has the right to command. The error has 
been that this right to command has so often been 
found in something merely external. When that hap- 
pens, it ceases to be something that liberates and be- 
comes that which enslaves, an arbitrary authority. It 
may be in a dogma or the letter of a sacred writing 
or the assumption of the ecclesiast; but it 1s not a 
spiritual authority, an authority that has a right to 
command free men, except as it establishes its right 
within the soul. When that happens, obedience be- 
comes the way of freedom. Such is the authority of 
God. If God were sheer power compelling submission, 
then the highest deed of man might be a Promethean 
defiance. But God is not a mere Power above that 
compels; he is a truth and a right that we know 
within. When we summon men to give themselves 


THE DEMOCRACY OF GOD 78 


to this God, we are asking them to give themselves to 
truth and righteousness and love and beauty which 
have their being in him. It is that to which Jesus 
summoned men to surrender. 

_ Further, the Christian God acknowledges for him- 
self the law of obligation which is essential to 
democracy. Democracy at its highest, as we saw, is 
not a clamor for rights but a passion for righteousness, 
the vision of a new and higher order in which hu- 
manity shall have its true life, and the devotion of 
self to that end. And such obligation, we noted, was 
to be in the measure of possession. That law of ob- 
ligation Jesus recognized for himself. Was he a 
revelation of God in this? He must have been or else 
we have found something to worship that is higher 
than God himself, and have gone back to the pagan 
idea that God is power transcending right. It is an 
error, of course, to speak of God being under the law 
of obligation in the sense that right is something apart 
from him or above him. This holy obligation of love 
is God; this is his very nature as revealed to us. The 
cross was not an unnatural episode; the life of utter 
love and service which the incarnation shows was only 
the making clear to men of the eternal spirit of God. 
Love, service, sacrifice—that is God. By the infinite 
measure of his wisdom and power and goodness, God 
is the obligated servant and savior of man. We make 
it present tense: “In all their affliction he is afflicted, 
and the angel of his presence saves them.” ** And the 
obligation comes not from our deserving, but from 


14Tsaiah Ixiii. 9. 


74 THE MEANING OF GOD 


the nature of mercy and goodness itself, which is his 
nature. 

There is a final element in democracy which we 
find in God and that is the element of faith—faith 
in men first of all, and then faith in the power of 
moral and spiritual forces, in truth and righteousness 
and love. A study of the anti-democratic movements 
and forces of the world to-day will usually show two 
aspects. First that of selfishness, the desire of one 
group or class or people to retain the privileges and 
power which they have. Secondly, there is a funda- 
mental feeling of distrust, a lack of faith in men, in 
the common man, in the colored man, in the foreigner, 
or as the case may be. The Christianity of Christ 
stands for a directly opposed spirit. It declares, with 
Whitman, that it will not ask for itself what others 
cannot have upon equal terms; and it is ready to trust 
the common man. We know the confidence that Jesus 
put in common men, It was to a little group of com- 
mon men that he committed the deepest interests with 
which he was concerned, and it was to common people 
that he brought the gifts of his love and of those 
transforming ideas which he poured out so prodigally 
in his speech. He did not, however, put his trust 
simply in men as he found them; he believed in the 
men that were to be. He believed that human nature 
could be transformed. He believed that men would 
answer to truth and justice and love. Men are saying 
to-day, “Look at human nature; with human nature 
as it is you cannot have democracy, you cannot expect 
to abolish war,” just as they said a while ago, “You 


THE DEMOCRACY OF GOD 75 


cannot wipe out the brothel or the saloon, with human 
nature as it is.” Democracy does not believe that its 
ideals can come with a humanity as it is, with the 
ignorance and passions and selfishness that we have 
to-day; but it believes in a humanity that can be 
educated and informed and changed. Christianity be- 
lieves that human nature can be redeemed and it trusts 
in moral and spiritual forces to achieve this. That is 
the faith of democracy. That was the faith of Jesus, 
and we believe that here, too, Jesus is the revelation 
of God. 

It remains for us to note what Christianity as a 
religion has to offer to that growing democracy which 
represents the highest social ideals of our day. What 
does the faith in a God like this mean to the men who 
hold these ideals? 

First, it offers an ideal of life. It summons men 
to freedom. It has that morality of initiative and 
responsibility for which Bertrand Russell calls in his 
religion of the future. Its God is not an autocrat 
demanding blind submission. It summons men not to 
servitude, but to free fellowship with the infinite Spirit 
of good will. It shows men a world that is in the 
making and a God who invites man to share in his 
creative task, 

Second, it affords democracy an authority that it 
can accept, one that is not arbitrary and external, but 
that presents itself to mind and conscience as the ap- 
peal of justice and truth. In such an authority it 
supplies one of democracy’s deepest needs. For the 
danger of democracy is that, having overthrown the 


76 THE MEANING OF GOD 


old autocracies, it will find itself without any authority 
at all. And that is largely the situation to-day. Men 
are insistent upon their rights and their desires; they 
fail to see that unless they unite in a common obedience 
to truth and justice and a common devotion of life, 
there can be no freedom and no large social life. So 
we have disunion and disorganization between class 
and class, between land and land. That weakness can 
be healed alone by finding some highest Righteousness, 
a God in whom goodness and power are one, and 
whom men can obey. 

Third, it offers a moral dynamic. Democracy is 
not simply a form of organization waiting merely to 
be adopted and then able to run itself. It is a social 
faith and a moral power that must first live in the 
hearts of men. It demands vision, patience, self-con- 
trol, self-subordination, devotion, codperation. These 
are spiritual qualities, and without them democracy 
will fail. Christianity is a religion that has the power 
to produce this spirit in men. 

Finally, it offers a needed faith. It bids men be- 
lieve in the midst of their struggles for a better world, 
that the final power that rules this world is a God 
of righteousness and good will. However strong brute 
force may seem, however deeply intrenched may be 
injustice and oppression, whatever the depth of ig- 
norance, the isstie is never in doubt. Whatever the 
temporary turn of battle, he who fights on God’s side 
and that of man never fights in vain. For God him- 
self is fighting. He is no idle spectator, no distant 
and indifferent ruler. He is the comrade of men, he 


THE DEMOCRACY OF GOD 77 


is their fellow toiler. Nay, more, he works in men 
and through men. It is his passion for righteousness 
that burns in their hearts, his courage that fills their 
breasts, his strength that strikes down evil, his love 
that binds them together. Bertrand Russell has pic- 
tured “A! Free Man’s Worship”: “Brief and powerless 
is man’s life; on him and all his race the slow, sure 
doom falls pitiless and dark. Blind to good and evil, 
reckless of destruction, omnipotent matter rolls on its 
relentless way; for Man, condemned to-day to lose 
his dearest, to-morrow himself to pass through the gate 
of darkness, it remains only to cherish, ere yet the 
blow falls, the lofty thoughts that ennoble his little 
day.” ** This is no free man’s worship, but only his 
cry of despair. Not in such a universe may we ever 
expect a free humanity, but rather in one in which 
a God of freedom and righteousness summons men 
to the faith and the task, and gives them assurance 
of the final issue. 


15 “Mysticism and Logic,” pages 56, 57. 


IV 
GOD AND THE WORLD OF EVIL 


THE problem of evil is one that is inseparable from 
any study of the meaning of God and from any study 
of religion itself. For the central conviction of reli- 
gion is God, and the conviction of God means the 
faith that the good and the real are one, that our 
ideals are not empty dreams that we cherish, but are 
real, indeed the highest reality, the final Power in this 
world. 

But it is one thing to see the Lord high and lifted 
up when we worship in the temple; it is another to 
go out into the world and look at nature and history 
and human life and say: Justice rules here, love con- 
trols, goodness is triumphant. On every hand the 
facts seem to contradict the thought that a good God 
rules the world. We look at the world of history: 
what a tangle of unmeaning events it shows. We look 
at human society: how constantly brute force and 
cunning and selfishness seem to have their way. Con- 
sider the years that have followed the Great War; how 
little has suffering fallen upon the guilty of all lands, 
what woe has come to great multitudes of those whose 


greatest fault was to practice the virtue lauded in all 
78 


GOD AND THE WORLD OF EVIL 79 


our modern world of being “loyal” to your country— 
that is, to the political or other leaders in control! 
And round about us, every day what suffering do we 
not see of the innocent for the guilty. 

It is not different if we turn to nature, except that 
nature seems to show, not so much injustice or cruelty, 
as an utter indifference. Long ago Socrates said: 
“Tf the gods do not prefer the good man to the evil, 
then it is better to die than to live.” How utterly 
intolerable life would be in a world in which the 
Power that ruled were either itself malevolent or else 
wholly indifferent to good or evil. Yet nature seems 
to beso ruled. There is a terrible obverse to the words 
of Jesus when he spoke of the God who made his sun 
to rise on the evil and the good, and sent his rain on 
the just and the unjust. For we must add that flood 
and fire come down on the good and the evil, and 
earthquake and pestilence destroy the just with the 
unjust. The nature which modern science presents 
us seems like a great mechanism of forces that blindly 
follow undeviating law, ending indifferently in life or 
death, in beauty or horror. 

There are some answers to this problem which have 
had large place in the Christian thought of the past, 
but which cannot any longer satisfy us, though there 
may be larger or lesser measure of truth in them. 
There is the opinion taken over from Judaism and 
the Old Testament that evil can be explained as the 
consequence that follows upon sin; even the men of 
the Old Testament (see Job and various Psalms) saw 
the facts of life which made this impossible. There 


80 THE MEANING OF GOD 


is the traditional idea of theology that a world which 
was perfectly good and free from pain and death 
through the single deed of one man became at a stroke 
wholly evil, involving in this fate all nature and the 
succeeding generations of mankind. For us animate 
creation, with its suffering and death, antedates too 
far the coming of man, and the supposed solution only 
heightens our difficulty by what it imposes on the many 
for the fault of the one. The traditional Calvinistic 
position which appeals to the inscrutable decrees of 
God does not meet the question, but simply gives it 
up. So in fact does apocalypticism, including modern 
premillennialism; it seeks the answer in some future 
age, but in doing so despairs of finding any meaning 
in history, which is just an unexplainable interlude 
in which God for some hidden reason has given over 
the world to the rule of evil. 

There are certain fundamental facts and insights 
which any discussion must take into account that hopes 
to answer this question for the faith of a modern man. 
Let us state them briefly. The world of nature is 
everywhere under the orderly process of law. The 
method of God’s work in the world is that of immanent 
power. Creation is a continuous activity of God. All 
spiritual life rests upon the natural and grows out of 
it, first that which is natural, afterwards that which 
is spiritual. The higher life can come only as a life 
of freedom, by way of conflict and slow achievement. 
It can come only as social life, and therefore human 
life must be considered never as merely individual, 
but always in relation to a social whole. This higher 


GOD AND THE WORLD OF EVIL 81 


life, moral, spiritual, a life like that of God, is alone 
that to which we can give absolute value, and it is 
worth all the years and the tears and the cost of its 
achievement.t On the basis of these considerations 
we might state our guiding principles in three simple 
words. Look at the highest, that is our clue to the 
meaning of the world. Look at the whole, for only 
in its relation to that can the meaning of any part 
be seen. Look at the end, “the last of life for which 
the first was planned.” 

Let it be said in frankness, finally, that there is 
no demonstration to be offered here. We move here 
in the world of values which can be felt but cannot 
be proven. The final demand is a demand upon faith, 
a demand to trust the world and undertake with cour- 
age the great task of life. The final assurance will 
come only to a life that has responded to this demand. 
And yet there is light here: it is not a leap in the 
dark to which we call men. And it is worth following 
what light we have in this supreme question. 

“This world’s no blot for us, nor blank; 


It means intensely and means good; 
To find its meaning is our meat and drink.” 2 


The seeming moral indifference of nature furnishes 
our first problem. Nature makes no distinction be- 
tween the evil and the good. Where is the providence 
that watches over the children of men? What dif- 
ference did nature ever make between saint and sinner? 

1See Troeltsch, Art. “Theodizec,’ Bd. V, Sp. 1180, “Religion 


in Geschichte und Gegenwart.” 
2 Browning, “Fra Lippo Lippi.” 


82 THE MEANING OF GOD 


The reign of law, science calls it. But has not that 
idea of law changed the world from a house in which 
a Father rules to the semblance of a great machine? 
What we seem to face is a Power that neither knows 
nor cares, but bears us on with all else that lives toward 
a common doom.° 

But suppose we consider a moment what the alter- 
native to all this would be. It seems a simple matter 
to ask God to adjust the happenings of nature in 
detail to fit our prayer or our desert. A certain saint 
with such a faith stood up in prayer meeting one even- 
ing and gave thanks to God for the dry summer that 
was just past. “When we received word last spring,” 
he explained, “that my mother-in-law was to visit us, 
I knew how bad a rainy season would be for her 
asthma. So I prayed the Lord that we might have 
no rain, and I am very grateful for this answer to 
prayer.” ‘And then, apparently for the first time, an- 
other angle suggested itself and he turned to the rest 
with the remark, “I hope it did not inconvenience any 
of you.” Whereupon one of those frank souls, who 
bring the breath of reality into places where it is 
needed, promptly replied, “You certainly did.” A 
world in whose physical order such constant inter- 
ference or change was taking place would be in effect 
a world of chance, of anarchy, a world essentially 
incalculable. 

Or consider the question from the standpoint of the 
character of God. What kind of a world would one 
expect from a God of perfect wisdom? Would it not 


8 See William James, “The Will to Believe,” page 41. 


GOD AND THE WORLD OF EVIL 83 


be a world of order? And would not the same order 
be needed to reflect the consistency, the dependable- 
ness, to use the Old Testament phrase, the faithfulness 
of God? The world of ordered and uniform happen- 
ing, so far from suggesting moral indifference, is de- 
manded by the moral character of God. 

But what of the moral significance of this uniform 
order which we call the reign of law? If it were pos- 
sible without utter anarchy to have a world that would 
adjust natural events moment by moment to moral 
desert, how would it compare in moral results_with 
the present order? Would it not seem like a world 
of righteousness? That depends upon our idea of a 
righteous world order. If it means an external system 
imposed upon man, then it might follow. But for 
most of us righteousness is not primarily such an ex- 
ternal order; it is a passion in the hearts of men, it 
is an inner spirit and devotion, not a calculation of 
profitable results but a faith that is willing to go 
against appearances; it is not something furnished to 
man, but that which is to grow up in humanity. A 
God who settled up accounts every day would have 
a set of time-serving subjects, not a family of free 
sons. 

Turn to the present world in which we live. (Keep 
in mind the large lock that takes in the social whole, 
the long look that has regard to history and not the 
moment, and the high look that concerns itself with 
life at its best.) It is this world of inflexible order, 
but of order upon which a man can count, that is 
needed for the growing of a human race. It is a 


84 THE MEANING OF GOD 


calculable, a knowable world, summoning man to 
understand its ways and to master its forces. It is 
the only kind of world that man could in real fashion 
know and use. Upon this order he has built his science, 
his engineering, his arts. So far as we can see, only 
in such a world could rational life develop. This is 
the world for the making of rational beings. 

Equally it is a world for the development of moral 
life. We are apt to think of morality in terms of 
high ideals that come to command the conscience; its 
beginnings, however, rest back in certain habits, or 
customs (mores) of individual and group which were 
found necessary to the furtherance of welfare. Such 
customs were restraints upon action that otherwise 
merely followed impulse or passion or individual in- 
terest. If there was to be human life, as above that 
of the beast, man had to master the impulse of the 
moment and look to the future, to learn self-control, 
to practice industry, to associate himself with others 
for common life and effort. What drove him to this? 
It was the experience that came to him in a 
world of inexorable order, a world where idle- 
ness was followed by hunger, and isolation by 
suffering, and wrong deeds by sure consequence. 
Even to-day, our race would go to pieces morally in 
a generation if our world should become one of uncer- 
tainty and chance. And let it be plainly understood, 
you cannot have a world of order in nature and at 
the same time a world in which some power from 
without with whatever high motive, is ever making 
adjustment to suit individual cases. 


GOD AND THE WORLD OF EVIL 85 


The second problem that faces us is that of the 
seeming cruelty of nature as seen in all the pain and 
suffering of the world. It is not simply that suffering 
may follow upon wrongdoing, but that pain and hard- 
ship and struggle, everywhere we turn, are inseparable 
from life itself, and so much of the pain seems futile. 

Our first issue here is one of values. Our age has 
multiplied creature comforts as no other day, but it 
has come to put an excessive value upon ease and 
pleasure and physical well-being, and it has developed 
an excessive fear of poverty and pain and toil. We 
need a truer scale of values. It is life that counts, life 
that brings with it wisdom and patience and strength 
and sympathy and insight, a faith that reaches up to 
God, an understanding that moves out to our fellow 
men. If the suffering and toil are necessary to this 
end, then with Browning we may 


“welcome each rebuff 
That turns earth’s smoothness rough.” 


Let us begin with pain, which seems the most nega- 
tive and useless. Why a world of pain? The physician 
answers, because pain is a necessary means of warning 
and defense. What physician would care to practice 
his art in a world in which there was no pain? How, 
indeed, could he? It is the red signal which warns 
the patient, guides the physician, and makes possible 
the healing art. It seems fair to suppose that man’s 
higher sensibility to pain has had a relation to his 
higher achievement in life. It is ‘‘a spur to wise action 


86 THE MEANING OF GOD 


in the process of human adjustment.” * And that is 
true of man’s advance in the higher reaches of life. 
From the soil of suffering there has sprung the 
fruitage of patience, courage, thoughtfulness, sym- 
pathy, kindliness, devotion. Would the doors to the 
deeper meanings of life be open in a world without 
struggle and pain? From out of her walls of utter 
darkness and silence, Helen Keller has spoken with 
moving words on this theme. “Most people measure 
their happiness in terms of physical pleasure and pos- 
session. If happiness is to be so measured, I who 
cannot hear or see have every reason to sit in a corner 
with folded hands and weep. ... As sinners stand 
up in meeting and testify to the goodness of God, so 
one who is called afflicted may rise up in gladness of 
conviction and testify to the goodness of life... . 
The struggle which evil necessitates is one of the 
greatest blessings. It makes us strong, patient, helpful 
men and women. It lets all into the soul of things 
and teaches us that although the world is full of suf- 
fering, it is full also of the overcoming of it.” ° 

The question of human toil and struggle is closely 
linked to this problem of pain. How full of burden 
and conflict seem the days of man. Whether he toils 

4See article on “The Meaning and Use of Pain,” Dr. Law- 
rence Irwell, the Medical Times, quoted in the Literary Digest 
of February 10, 1917. It is a well-known fact that increasing 
sensitiveness to pain marks the ascent in the scale of life. The 
same is true when we come to the human race and the advancing 
stages of culture. We may lament this as an incidental misfor- 
tune or a mark of weakness. Is it not rather a condition of 


advance at each stage, physical, cultural, spiritual? 
5 “Optimism,” pages 13, 17. 


GOD AND THE WORLD OF EVIL 87 


for his bread, or seeks to keep dread disease from his 
door, or craves the higher gifts of liberty and peace, 
nature seems ever to turn a hard face toward him and 
exact the fullest measure of toil and conflict and 
vigilance as the condition of his desire. But is nature 
so unfriendly? Is not this far kinder than the foolish 
weakness which we sometimes show to our children? 
How else could strength come if there were no conflict 
or resistance? The lands where food is plentiful and 
the least of toil is needed are not the lands that have 
seen the highest fruitage of humanity. There are gifts 
that can be dropped into idle hands, but the highest 
goods do not come that way. You may give a man 
bread without cost to himself, but not strength or 
wisdom or freedom or peace or love. We must give 
assent to the words of a recent writer, who describes 
with sympathy the struggles of various peoples for a 
larger measure of freedom, and then says: “It prob- 
ably will seem a very cruel thing to say, but if I were 
the great Molder of the Universe, I would not turn 
a hand or pull a cord to give the struggling, submerged 
peoples of the world their freedom. Itis the dreaming 
and fighting and sacrificing that makes them worthy 
and prepares them for it.”° No nation is deserving 
of political and social liberties except as it wins them 
again in each generation. ‘As a matter of fact no 
nation ever remains in possession of such liberties 
unless it wins them for itself in each new day, fighting 
the old fight which appears with each age in some new 
form. 


6 Frazier Hunt, “The Rising Temper of the East,” page 243. 


88 THE MEANING OF GOD 


It would be easy to mistake the meaning of that 
fight which the men of social faith and passion are 
waging to-day, whose front is directed chiefly against 
war and social injustice. It would seem as though 
such men were trying to make a world in which there 
should no longer be toil and conflict. As a matter 
of fact the campaign against social injustice is not an 
effort to remove conflict, but to remove handicaps, 
to give a fair chance for all the children of men. The 
plea for cooperation means simply that men must find 
a way of turning their forces against the common foes 
of ignorance and poverty instead of rending each 
other. And what shall we say of war? We remember 
the stirring words in Browning’s “Luria”: 


“They called our thirst of war a transient thing; 
‘The battle element must pass away 
From life,’ they said, ‘and leave a tranquil world’ 
—Master, I took their light and turned it full 
On that dull turgid vein they said would burst 
And pass away; and as I looked on life, 
Still everywhere I tracked this, though it hid 
And shifted, lay so silent as it thought, 
Changed shape and hue yet ever was the same. 
Why, ’twas all fighting, all their nobler life! 
All work was fighting, every harm—defeat, 
And every joy obtained—a victory!” 


There are those whose hatred of war has made them 
feel that we should banish the pictures of conflict from 
our religious speech, that we should no longer think 
of Jesus as the Captain of mankind, or longer sing, 


“The Son of God goes forth to war.” 


But Browning was right, the Browning who could 


GOD AND THE WORLD OF EVIL 89 
say, “I was ever a fighter.” What we want is not to 
banish war, but to change it. The war which uses 
for weapons brute force, which sets men to starve 
and poison and kill their fellow men, that war is hell, 
and is more hellish to-day than it was two generations 
ago when a great general so described it. But so long 
as there is evil of any kind on earth, Christianity will 
summon men to take all the weapons of truth and love 
and courage and devotion and fight to the end. 

Let it be said again, the highest gifts of life can 
come to men only as they struggle for them, nor are 
they less God’s gifts because they come this way. He 
who sees this truth will ask no deliverance from the 
struggle. 


“Let us have peace, and thy blessing, 
Lord of the wind and the rain, 
When we shall cease from oppressing, 
From all injustice refrain; 
When we hate falsehood and spurn it; 
When we are men among men. 
Let us have peace when we earn it, 
Never an hour till then. 


“Let us have rest in thy garden, 
Lord of the rock and the green, 
When there is nothing to pardon, 
When we are whitened and clean. 
Purge us of skulking and treason, 
Help us to put them away. 

We shall have rest in thy season; 
Till then the heat of the fray. 


“Let us have peace in thy pleasure, 
Lord of the cloud and the sun; 
Grant to us zons of leisure 
When the long battle is done. 


90 THE MEANING OF GOD 


Now we have only begun it; 

Stead us!—we ask nothing more. 
Peace—rest—but not till we’ve won it— 
Never an hour before.” ? 


With the third aspect of the problem of evil we 
turn from nature to human nature, and that on the 
social side; the problem is that of the unjust suffering 
which comes to man because of his relation to his 
fellow men. Nothing in life seems more tragic or 
unfair than this, Back of our great wars there lies 
not the suffrage of the many, but the selfish aims or 
folly of the few; yet the multitudes must suffer, the 
children starve, the women go lonely, the men be 
slaughtered or maimed, and the toilers bear intolerable 
burdens for generations. Men go on their way of 
heedless lust and little children are cursed with sight- 
less eyes or blighted bodies and souls. On every side 
the punishment of greed and hate and folly seems to 
fall on the innocent. 

Here again we must face the fact of alternatives. 
In our loose thinking it is so easy to demand of God 
a justice that shall be purely individual, each man 
suffering only for his own misdeeds, while yet we ask 
for all the goods that come from a social life.. But 
right here we must reckon with the full meaning of 
the social fact: the highest life, in fact any human 
life, is possible only as we are bound together, and 
that high life is worth the cost. Human personality 
never could appear in a solitary individual; Tarzan 
of the apes is possible only in fiction. And the higher 


* Bert Leston Taylor, in the Chicago Tribune, 


GOD AND THE WORLD OF EVIL 91 


we move in the scale of life the more closely are men 
united and the wider the scope of that union. A man 
may feel by himself and work by himself, but if there 
is to be love he must join himself to another. The 
greatest treasures of life are inseparable from these 
social bonds, from home, community, friendship, 
church, country. Truth, beauty, justice, loyalty, love, 
these have come to being only in the associated life 
of men. 

Such association heightens of necessity the possi- 
bility of human suffering. One branch does not feel 
it when another is sundered from the trunk, but when 
one member suffers the whole body bears the pain. 
Yet every day reveals again the willingness of men to 
endure the cross and despise the shame for the joy 
that is set before them. Every friendship means in- 
crease of responsibility and sympathy and possible 
suffering. The home gives proof that in the closest 
fellowship joy and pain are inseparably intertwined. 
This does not mean that individually we sit down and 
conclude that we will take the evil because it is a 
condition of the higher good. It is rather that men, 
seeing the joy that is set before them, life with all 
its high meaning, count the toil and pain not as neg- 
ligible incident, but as that which is to be borne will- 
ingly and bravely. 

And then, with the Christian conception, we go one 
step further. We gain the idea of vicarious suffering, 
suffering that has a meaning, suffering for others and 
in the place of others, suffering that has love in its 
heart and so is transformed in its inner nature. The 


92 THE MEANING OF GOD 


Christian faith declares that the cross of Christ was 
not accident and not tragedy, however great the guilt 
of human agents in that event; it declares that God 
was acting there, that God himself was suffering there, 
and that in that suffering there was healing for human 
life. Such love and suffering, it declares, is not an 
incident, but is eternal in the nature of God. As 
Browning has put it: 
“This is the authentic sign and seal 
Of godship, that it ever waxes glad 
And more glad, until gladness blossoms, bursts 
Into a rage to suffer for mankind, 
And recommences at sorrow, drops like seed. 
Surely it has no other end and aim 
Than to drop, once more die into the ground, 
Taste cold and darkness, and oblivion there; 


And thence rise, tree-like grow through pain to joy, 
More joy and most joy—do man good again.” 


Christianity calls to man and says: In all your affliction 
God is afflicted; he suffers in all the pain of men. That 
pain is not useless. And he who brings to it the right 
spirit drinks the cup which Jesus drank and, so doing, 
enters into the highest life of God. 

The fourth element of our problem comes when 
we think of the individual in relation to the idea of 
development. There is, of course, a real help for faith 
in this thought of development. It gives to history 
ameaning, All that apocalypticism could say was that 
some time the good would be established, but it could 
give no meaning to the evil ages that lay between. We 
see more clearly now that humanity must reach its 
goal by growth, that whatever may be our dependence 


GOD AND THE WORLD OF EVIL 93 


upon God for that triumph, the future must come out 
oi the past. Our toil and pain then are not without 
meaning. In them God is working toward his great 
end. So we count our affliction as light while we look 
to the things that are not seen and yet are sure and 
eternal, And while history gains a meaning, so does 
our individual life; we have a chance in this growing 
world, we may have a part in its making. There may 
be souls who would prefer a world that was perfectly 
safe and made for comfort and ease, but we may be 
sure the highest souls answer to a different call. For 
in the highest life there is something of the spirit of 
a Paul, pressing on from the fields where the real work 
has been done to some untried Spain which calls to 
courage and offers high opportunity.*® 

But what of the individual himself in this long 
story? Modern science has made us think of human 
history on this globe in terms of scores and even hun- 
dreds of thousands of years. What of the long gen- 
erations who had little knowledge and less help in the 
years that lie before history dawned? 


“Oh, the generations old 
Over whom no church bell tolled. 
Christless lifting up blind eyes 
To the silence of the skies!” 


For us as Christians it is not enough to say that their 
lives found their meaning as a necessary first step for 
that which was to come; for us, human life in its 
least members can never be a mere means to some one 


8 Compare William James, “Pragmatism,” page 290. 


94 THE MEANING OF GOD 


else’s end. And what of the lives imperfect, frus- 
trated, failures in our own day? 

I am not raising here the question of sin and its 
punishment, nor asking whether man may so use op- 
portunity that a fixed and unchangeable character 
results for which there is no help here or beyond. Our 
question concerns the lives without opportunity and 
the lives that were not fixed. And here Christian 
thought is far less dogmatic and far more hopeful than 
it once was. So much at least we can say. Before 
we charge to God’s score these lives that had so much 
of pain, so little of chance, let us be sure that his long 
years have not for them more in store than hard and 
fast theories have fixed in the past. 

The discussion of the problem of evil is inevitably 
of a somewhat negative and apologetic character. In 
it faith is put upon the defensive. And yet in sum- 
ming up we can discern more positive conclusions. 
First of all, modern thinking helps us to a stronger 
position than was possible for the traditional view- 
point. Weare not dealing with a finished world which 
has been turned out as the direct product of sheer 
omnipotence. From that standpoint it is impossible 
to justify the ways of God with man. We have a 
truer appreciation of how power is conditioned, of 
the manner in which it must work when it deals with 
life, and especially moral-spiritual life. The world 
for us is a growing world, not one that is fixed and 
finished. Life itself is in the making and we cannot 
judge human life, in whole or in its individual mem- 


GOD AND THE WORLD OF EVIL 95 


bers, till we see the end. In the second place, the very 
study of this problem leads us to deeper insight and 
truer conception of the character of God and his way 
with the world. In the light of this discussion how 
shall we sum up our faith? 

We believe in a God of utter goodness, in whom 
righteousness and truth and love have even now their 
full and true being. We believe that this God has 
in himself fullness of life and that all life comes from 
him and all being depends upon him. Because of his 
very goodness, which is love, this infinite Spirit seeks 
for other being to which he may give of his life, a 
world of nature in which beauty and wisdom shall 
appear, but above all a world of personal being which 
can make response to him in understanding and loyalty 
and love, in a true personal fellowship of a life like 
his own. And here we face one of those final facts, 
those ultimate data which cannot be further grounded 
in reason: life itself, if it is to be individual being, 
if it is to have character and meaning, must have a 
certain freedom, a chance at self-achievement through 
growth with all of effort and conflict and possible 
error that is involved. And so creation comes to be, 
not mechanical but a vital process, a method that has 
large place for trial and error, a way that is long and 
slow and hard and full of toil and pain. And yet 
the Eternal Spirit does not stand outside the life of 
his world. He is not simply at the beginning and at 
the goal; he is help and direction in it all. And in 
the long story of mankind, he is comrade and toiler 


96 THE MEANING OF GOD 


and fellow-sufferer. And he is the assurance of vic- 
tory. Not because he will force the conclusion at last 
when freedom fails, but because the forces which he 
employs in the way of freedom are mightier than all 
that oppose: love stronger than selfishness, good will 
mightier than hate, truth more potent than darkness, 
justice more enduring than unrighteousness. And life, 
life like this, seems good, life which calls for faith 
and courage, life which brings suffering and labor, 
yet which in all this may be conscious of the fellowship 
of God, life which is sure of final triumph. 

Such a vision cannot but give to him who holds it 
courage for life and joy in living. And yet this is not 
the last word of Christianity nor the first. This is an 
appeal to the mind and, if I may make the contrast 
so bald, the final appeal of Christianity is to the will. 
It summons men to an act of faith, that faith which is 
neither knowledge nor blind credulity, but the courage 
of a soul that will act out its life on the basis of the 
highest that it knows, supremely on the basis of that 
vision of God and of the meaning of life which comes 
to us in Jesus Christ. He who thus loyally gives him- 
self will find another kind of answer to the problem 
of evil, whether he finds further light for the mind 
or not. He will discover that this Good to which he 
surrenders himself is real, that the God in whom he 
trusts is good. He will find that this Good in the 
world of his soul as in the world about him is mightier 
than evil; more and more he will be sure that evil is 
here only to be overcome. And he will discover that, 
with the right attitude on his part, there takes place 


GOD AND THE WORLD OF EVIL 97 


a strange transmutation by which evil itself becomes 
for him the occasion and means of good.°® 


9See L. P. Jacks, “Religious Perplexities,” page 80. “In its 
essence the Gospel is a call to make ... the experiment of fel- 
lowship, the experiment of trusting the heart of things, throw- 
ing self-care to the winds, in the sure and certain faith that you 
will not be deserted, forsaken, or betrayed, and that your ultimate 
interests are perfectly secure in the hands of the Great Com- 
panion. This insight, this sure and firm apprehension of a spirit 
at hand, swiftly responsive to any trust we have in its answering 
fidelity, coming to our way the moment we beckon it, motion- 
less and irresponsive till we hoist the flag of our faith and claim 
its fellowship, but then mighty to save—this is the center, the 
kernel, the growing point of the Christian religion, which, when 
we have it all else is secure, and when we have it not all else 
is precarious.” 

For further discussion of the general problem see Chapter II 
of the author’s “A Working Faith.” 


V 
THE GOD OF OUR LORD JESUS CHRIST 


THE truest definition of Christianity is Jesus Christ. 
One of the earliest and best Christian creeds is that 
contained in Paul’s phrase, “the God and Father of 
our Lord Jesus Christ,” or, as a modern writer has 
put it, “I believe in God through Jesus Christ our 
Lord.” * At whatever point we consider Christianity, 
whether it be its conception of life, its thought of man, 
its doctrine of salvation, its idea of the Church, its 
hope for the future, everywhere it is Jesus who deter- 
mines its nature. And that is eminently true of its 
thought of God which is the heart of its faith. It is 
in this light that our study has been made so far, but 
we need now to turn specifically to this consideration: 
What is the meaning of God as known in Jesus Christ? 

Our study is not primarily, let it be noted, a study 
of the nature of Christ, but of the nature of God. 
There has been a curious inversion here in the history 
of Christian thought. The writers of the New Tes- 
tament with a sure touch show that their supreme 
interest in Christ is that in him they know God and 
have God. Their great question is the question about 


1 James Denney. 
98 


THE GOD OF OUR LORD JESUS CHRIST 99 


God: Can we know him? What is he like? What 
is his will for us, what his purpose? And they have 
found an answer in Jesus. Jesus they know, and in 
him God is known. “God was in Christ,” says Paul, 
summing up the message of the Christian embassy.? 
“No man hath seen God at any time,” says the author 
of the Fourth Gospel; “the only begotten Son, who 
is in the bosom of the Father, he hath declared him.” ® 
The theologies of the Church, however, have spent 
little time in discussing the difference which Jesus has 
made in man’s thought of God; and you by no means 
always gain the impression that the God of the creeds 
is above everything else the Christlike God. On the 
other hand a vast amount of time has been spent in 
considering the other question of the nature of Christ 
and whether he be really like God. But, as Bishop 
Temple suggests: “To ask whether Christ is divine 
is to suggest that Christ is an enigma while deity is a 
simple and familiar conception. The truth is the exact 
opposite to this. We know, if we will open our eyes 
and look, the life and character of Christ; but of God 
we have no clear vision.” * And Christian thinking 
has no greater need than this, to ask seriously what 
it means really to believe that we have “the light of 
the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of 
Jesus Christ.’ Can there be any greater conviction 
than this, that in a world of. mingled darkness and 
broken gleams there has come to us a sure light, that 


22 Corinthians v. 19. 
8 John i. 18. 
4 “Foundations,” page 214. 


100 THE MEANING OF GOD 


the Eternal Spirit has surely and fully revealed him- 
self to us by appearing in time, and has let us know 
what he is and what we may hope for? 
“ And first we need to turn to the historic Jesus. 
What was this life in time in which the Eternal was 
known to men? Nineteen centuries ago a young man 
went forth from his home in a village of an outlying 
Roman province. All his years had been lived in 
humblest surroundings; he was the son of an artisan 
and himself had worked at the carpenter’s bench. But 
his heart had been stirred by the tale of a prophet 
that had arisen, and his soul answered to the message 
of righteousness and repentance and coming deliver- 
ance which came from the stern preacher. Asking 
for himself also the rite of baptism, he who had lived 
his life in simplest, purest fellowship with God, re- 
ceived the assurance that he was the Deliverer whom 
his nation expected. Driven by the Spirit of God, 
stirred to his depths by the great conviction of his 
mission, he leaves the prophet and the throngs to be 
alone with God and the question of his life. And so 
at last he goes forth, not to assert authority, not to 
claim homage as king or rally a people to throw off 
the yoke of their foes, but as a humble teacher, wander- 
ing up and down the land, speaking to who would 
listen. Great multitudes follow him, attracted by heal- 
ings which he wrought, only to leave him when the 
searching demand of his message becomes plain. More 
and more he gives himself to the little group of his 
close followers. To them he declares at length that 
he must bear his witness in the city of his people, 


THE GOD OF OUR LORD JESUS CHRIST 101 


though he sees the danger even more clearly than 
they. There in the great city, after but a few short 
years of work, the leaders whose enmity he has won 
put him to death. That death he meets, not without 
a struggle, but with the final assurance that by his 
very death he is serving God’s end and that the future 
is sure. The event confirmed his faith; his death was 
not the end, but the beginning of the greatest religious 
movement of mankind. 

Jesus left behind him, as we know, no writings, 
and of those words of his, flung forth upon the air, 
probably not one was written down in his lifetime. 
He left no organization or prescription for any, so far 
as record shows. He left no creed for men to accept, 
no code prescribed for conduct. But it takes little 
study to show the immense advantage which Chris- 
tianity has had in the possession of this life story. 
That is illustrated in her struggle with the two main 
forms of religion that competed with her for the suf- 
frage of the Roman world. On the one hand were 
the mystery religions, in externals not without some 
likeness to Christianity, offering salvation through 
various rites to the members of a fellowship gathered 
about the figure of some hero god. But Dionysus and 
Mithra and Isis and Attis were mythical figures; Jesus 
had lived among men and to his life and teachings 
men could always turn. On the other hand were the 
speculative systems, whether the older Grecian philos- 
ophies or the theosophies which then as now came 
from the East. Against them the new faith brought 
to bear the conviction that in this historic life and 


102 THE MEANING OF GOD 


death a living God had come to men and had done 
something for men. 

Such is the plain historic fact. What is the meaning 
which Christianity has found in this fact? Why is 
Jesus not simply one among other great teachers, but 
central and supreme? What is it in the experience of 
men that has led them to give him this absolute place? 
It is not enough to quote titles from the New Tes- 
tament; our theology is not made by words, even from 
the Bible. We must go back to the experience of the 
Church, the historic Church and the living Church of 
to-day, and ask what it was which led men to use 
these names for Jesus. 

We put first the moral lordship of Jesus. The 
Church has called him Lord and Master, and the con- 
sciousness of this authority is evident in Jesus himself. 
He called unto him whom he would, and they followed 
him. He demanded the utmost of men, an absolute 
obedience which reached the inmost thoughts and de- 
sires as well as outward words and deeds. He took 
the highest authority of the past and said, “It is writ- 
ten; .. . but Tsay unto you.” This absolute authority 
does not mean external authority. It was not to him- 
self in individual fashion that Jesus required submis- 
sion; it was to the truth, to love, to righteousness, 
to God. Only, he knew that these were in him and 
spoke through him. His ethics was the ethics in which 
authority and freedom united, in which men were set 
free because they had found the highest and sur- 
rendered utterly to it. It was an ethics of the spirit. 
Nothing more terrible could happen than to have*the 


THE GOD OF OUR LORD JESUS CHRIST 108 


light that was in a man turn into darkness: nothing 
better could happen than for a man to have in him the 
spirit of the Father and to live that spirit out as the 
brother of men. 

This moral mastery of Jesus appears at two places. 
First of all he has made plain to us what human life 
is, the life in which a man achieves his real self. We 
talk about humanity being weak and wicked and 
foolish. But that is not real humanity; that is hu- 
manity gone astray, or humanity on the road with its 
goal still far off. The real meaning of humanity we 
see in Jesus. There we see what we ought to be, our 
real selves. And more and more men are recognizing 
that. We may be laggard in obedience, or faithless 
in performance, or we may set up the standard of our 
own selfish will, but for thoughtful and sincere men 
Jesus is becoming more and more the conscience of 

the race. 
_ The second place of Jesus’ mastery appears when 
we turn from the individual ideal to the social goal. 
No one will dream of saying to-day that the social 
life of our humankind in state and industry and other 
relations is a success. What Christianity sees is that 
the key to the future lies in the moral lordship of 
Jesus, That again may be easily misunderstood. A 
crude expression of it is a picture of a millennium 
with a returned and visible Christ ruling an autocratic 
state. What we mean is much deeper, much more 
searching. We mean that the goal of humanity is to + 
be a life in which the spirit of Jesus is to have sway. 
If he stands for the ways of reason and justice and 


104 THE MEANING OF GOD 


goodwill, then there must be an end of militarism with 
its reliance upon force. If he stands for brotherhood, 
then we must find a way of transcending the walls 
which nationalistic selfishness and race fear and 
prejudice have erected, and of securing a united world. 
If he stands for cooperation and the life of service, 
then we must seek an industrial order in which the 
method of warfare and the motive of individual profit 
will be displaced from their present preéminence. We 
call this the kingdom of God, but when we want to 
give real meaning to the phrase, it becomes, as it was 
with Paul for example, the rule of the spirit of Christ. 
And this rule of the Christ spirit is not simply our 
dream for the future: it is the commanding authority 
for the present social life, more and more recognized 
by Christian conscience. 

But what has been said about this rule of the Christ 
Spirit implies another important fact: the moral lord- 
ship of Jesus does not rest simply upon what he said, 
but even more upon what he was. It is beside the 
mark to talk about the inadequacy of Jesus’ social 
teachings as a guide for our modern life. Jesus did 
not lay down rules concerning industry and property 
and the state: he did what was more important, he 
showed men the way of the spirit. And this spirit 
was first of all in his own way of life. The moral 
lordship of Jesus cannot be discussed without con- 
sidering the moral character and achievement of Jesus. 
It is strange how little attention has been paid to this 
by the theology of the Church as compared with its 
discussion of substance and natures about which its 


THE GOD OF OUR LORD JESUS CHRIST 105 


knowledge has been so much less. Yet this is of the 
most vital interest to the Christian man, 

Look at the facts first. It is not just the sinlessness 
of Jesus that we are considering. To that Christian 
faith has held, but that of itself is negative. And 
sometimes it has been joined to an idea of Jesus’ life 
that made it less than human, as though back of the 
appearance of a man there dwelt some divine being 
who felt no real temptation, who lived without real 
growth or conflict and could not really do wrong. The 
full moral mastery of Jesus is not kept if we yield 
to any such heresy, however orthodox some people may 
suppose it. We keep it only as we find in Jesus a 
true and full human life, a life which was a real 
achievement, a life that was made perfect under the 
conditions under which we must live. Let us be grate- 
ful here that the stubborn facts of the Gospels have 
saved us from an error so fatal to our deeper needs. 

We find in Jesus a life that has known temptation 
and conquered it. We find in him a life that grew 
through the years to its full attainment. But when 
we seek to describe that character, our words are too : 
weak and our discernment too slight. He lived the 
perfect life with eal, His was an utter devotion to 
it was his joy and his strength. “My meat is to do 3 
the will of him that sent me.’ He had an absolute 
confidence_in God. No one saw more clearly than 
he the power of evil, or shrank from it more, and 
the story of Gethsemane tells the tale of his struggle 
when he faced its full meaning at last. Yet so clear 


106 THE MEANING OF GOD 


for him was the power of God, so utterly sure was 
he of God’s perfect goodness that his life moves on 
before us as one not only of trust but of radiant joy 
and peace. He lived a life of simple humility and 
dependence upon God. All that he had came from 
God; it was the Spirit of God that spoke through him, 
it was by the finger of God that he cast out demons. 
“TI can of myself do nothing.” His praying is an 
expression of this dependence, and in this dependence 
is rooted his independence over against all else. 

In his relation to others he lived what he taught and 
was himself more than all his teaching. He had a 
genius for friendship; he was human, accessible, lov- 
ing. He had a spirit of utter goodwill for all men, 
and no lack of desert, no indifference or ingratitude, 
no answering hatred even, could overcome it. He gave 
the word “love” a new meaning by his life. He 
brought his own life wholly under the ideal of service. 
And yet all this was at the farthest remove from 
sentimentality or weakness. There was a certain 
sternness and inflexibility in him. Because he loved 
men he could not be satisfied with less than the highest 
for them. He had a passion for justice and a hatred 
of all sin and impurity. 

Most wonderful is the completeness of his life. It 
is not mere sinlessness that makes him an ideal for 
men; it is the remarkable fact that in his character 
men of all times, of every race and station and con- 
dition, have found that which has inspired and com- 
manded them. “Nowhere is such humility, such utter 
dependence upon God; nowhere such courage and in- 


THE GOD OF OUR LORD JESUS CHRIST 107 


dependence over against men. In him we see the 
tenderness of a woman; but joined to it is a virility, 
a masterfulness which too often has been overlooked 
by theology and art alike. The Gospel pages show 
his love for children, his patience with all the weak; 
they show as well the flaming passion of a great and 
militant soul. He abounded with love and pity; and 
yet how stern he was with himself. In simple whole- 
some spirit he enters into all the joys of men; yet 
side by side in perfect unity we see the nights of 
prayer and the life of perfect fellowship with God.” ® 

How shall we interpret this moral and spiritual 
_mastery of Jesus? It is an interesting fact that in the 
past men have sought the grounds for calling Jesus 
divine first of all in the physical, the external, in 
miracles of virgin birth and bodily resurrection, and 
in miracles wrought by him. We are coming to see 
that the divine meaning of Christ must be sought first 
of all in his life, in his own moral and spiritual being. 
Of this life we must say two things. First it was 
genuinely human, not something settled in advance. 
He learned, he grew, he prayed, he fought temptation. 
It was not a sham humanity whose course was abso- 
lutely determined by something that came into the 
world with him. On the other hand we must say 
that this life was the deed of God, the gift of God, 
the absolute manifestation of God. Here was one 
human life that was wholly open to God, that had no 
will but God’s will, no desire but God. For that rea- 
son it was possible for this life to be filled and pos- 


5 From the author’s “A Working Faith,” page 133. 


108 THE MEANING OF GOD 


sessed and constituted by the divine. So much, with- 
out any further theory, seems demanded by the Gospel 
accounts. 

If this be true, then this is the first place where 
Christianity as the absolute religion expresses itself, 
then we have here the absolute ideal of life and will 
of God for men. Is it not time that the Church itself 
appreciated this more? Here in fact is the crucial test 
for Christianity just now. The most dangerous 
paganism to-day is that which is right in our midst, 
which is willing to do homage to the Church and to 
repeat the words of our creeds, but which will not 
recognize the right of the spirit of Christ as the only 
rule for business and state and every other part of 
human life. Impossible idealism, foolish sentimental- 
ism, religion mixing up in politics: such are the words 
of men who tell us that business is business, that we live 
in a practical age, and that we must take men as they 
are. But if Christianity be the absolute religion, then 
here we must stand because we cannot do otherwise, 
and we must declare as against paganism, with its 
gods of force and selfishness and cunning, that the 
eternal God himself speaks to us in the spirit of Jesus 
Christ, and that there is no other way by which men 
and nations may be saved. 

From the moral lordship of Jesus we thus pass to 
our second consideration of his meaning, and that is 
in the sphere of salvation. The idea of salvation is 
not limited to the Christian religion. It is, in fact, 
the common concern of all religions. The first thing 
that man wants from his religion is help, deliverance 


THE GOD OF OUR LORD JESUS CHRIST 109 


from the ills that weigh upon him, and the promise 
of the good for which he longs. It is an interesting 
fact that the word “Savior” is applied to Jesus but 
very little in the New Testament, and even the word 
“salvation” is used very sparingly in the older books. 
But that does not alter the fact that this was the su- 
preme interest of the early Christians. This was the 
heart of their hope, “that it was he who should redeem 
rsraely. 

The Church has often narrowed the idea of salva- 
tion and lost its larger meanings. Sometimes it has 
seemed to denote no more than some arrangement 
connected with the death of Jesus by which it became 
possible for God to forgive sins. We are coming again 
to see its larger meaning. For it should not be made 
to stand for anything less than humanity’s deliverance 
from all its ills and the gift to humanity of all its 
life. Salvation, in other words, involves that to which 
we are saved as well as that from which we are saved, 
and it must be as broad as life itself, life individual 
and social, in this world and in that to come. 

What then is the meaning of Jesus for this supreme 
concern of man? The offers of salvation have been 
as numerous as have been the religions and philosophies 
of life. The mystery religions of the early Christian 
centuries, the great rivals of Christianity, were pre- 
eminently religions of redemption. We see about us 
to-day innumerable modern cults, social, philosophical, 
psychological, mystical, each making its appeal to the 
same interest. What does Jesus stand for here? How 
does he bring life and help to men? Our answer to 


110 THE MEANING OF GOD 


this to-day must be more social and more psychological 
than it has been in the past. It must include, not 
simply individual experience but the social life and 
needs as well, and it must be set forth in terms of 
the actual moral, religious experience of men. 

The Christian solution is marked first of all by its 
diagnosis of the evil from which men are to be de- 
livered. There are, of course, weakness and suffering 
and poverty and ignorance and human folly; but the 
supreme problem is that of sin. Sin, Christianity 
teaches, is selfishness and selfishness is disruption for 
the social group and death for the individual in all 
higher life. Sin, it declares, is the fundamental dis- 
loyalty, man’s “No” to the highest which he sees, no 
to conscience, to his highest self, to God. Its neces- 
sary result is isolation from one’s fellows, from the 
forces of good, from God. This Jesus saw, but he 
saw too that the deliverance of man must come 
through a new attitude, a new spirit, and a renewed 
relation with God. 

What then, in terms of actual experience of help, 
has Jesus done for men in all these years? He has 
shown men what sin really is and what life may be, 
waking a hatred for sin, stirring the desire for this 
life. He has shown men God, the God of righteous- 
ness and holiness, the God of mercy and infinite good- 
will; and to those who have known him he has made 
this God near and real. And then he has led men into 
living fellowship with that God, a fellowship which 
has become the transforming power of life. We know 
how many things stand in the way of such a fellow- 


THE GOD OF OUR LORD JESUS CHRIST 111 


ship with the Eternal which is the heart of religion. 
To some men God seems so far off and so unreal. 
For some he means the hard renunciation of the old 
way of self-will and lower interests. And some who 
know their sin and have caught the vision of the good 
and of God, are simply wakened to the realization 
of how the evil of their impotent lives separates them 
from such a God. But the Jesus who gives the vision 
and kindles the desire has met this last problem as well, 
and in his own way. He has not minimized men’s sin 
nor abated from the vision of the high God, but he 
has given men the courage to believe in a God of 
mercy who seeks men in their sins, a God who in 
forgiveness receives men as his children in order that 
in this new fellowship they may have the power indeed 
to become his children. And thus he has met the final 
problem of life, the problem of moral and spiritual 
dynamic. 

The social meaning of the doctrine of salvation has 
been too much neglected in the past or else misunder- 
stood. This that we call the social gospel, however, 
is not new, nor is it a separate kind of Gospel. Social 
salvation is like any salvation; it simply means that 
we have come to realize more clearly that human life 
is something more than individual experience and con- 
duct, and that Christianity can aim at nothing less than 
the redemption of all life. The meaning of Chris- 
tianity for this life we have already considered in 
part in our study of the democracy of God. Here 
it remains to point out that we are dealing not simply 
with ethics, nor yet with a social transformation that 


112 THE MEANING OF GOD 


will take place automatically as individuals one by one 
become good. Rather we are dealing with a real social 
_ Salvation. The way of Christ for men in their social 
- life is the same as for their more individual problems. 
‘We must learn to see our sin in this our associated 
life and to hate it, our wars and intrigues and oppres- 
sions, our public corruption and our civic indifference, 
our boast of high ideals and the actual poverty and 
ignorance and suffering of great masses even in the 
most favored lands. We must repent and seek for- 
giveness. We must as peoples devote ourselves in a 
new consecration to truth and justice and mercy and 
service—that is, to God. And we must seek a new 
heart without which we shall never reach the new day. 

Such is the way of salvation for which Christ 
stands, the way that we find indicated by his words, 
his spirit, his life, his death, and what these have 
meant in the life of his followers. Here is the power 
that has been transforming men and women for these 
many centuries, the power upon which the world waits 
to-day. What does it mean? What else except what 
the early Church saw and Christian men ever since? 
When we look at all this we can only say, “This is 
the finger of God.’ What we have here is God work- 
ing among men. Here is the will of God, this forgive- 
ness is the mercy of God, this help can be nothing 
less than the power of God. So we confess with 
Paul, “God was in Christ, reconciling the world unto 
himself.” The first and foremost significance of all 
this is for our meaning of God: this is what God is 
doing, this is what God is like. 


THE GOD OF OUR LORD JESUS CHRIST 118 


There is a significant testimony to be found in the 
way in which men, some of them outside the Christian 
Church, are coming to see that the Christ spirit is the 
only way out of the terrible conditions that press upon 
us to-day. Here are the words of Professor Gilbert 
Murray, himself an agnostic in the common sense of 
the term: “The common man, after this surfeit of 
hatred, is wearying for a return to love; after this 
welter of bestial cruelty, is searching for some dawn 
of Divine mercy; after this horror of ill-doing and 
foulness unforgettable is crying out, each man in his 
loneliness, for the spirit that is called Christ.’’ This is 
real faith, And we have the same confession when 
Sir Philip Gibbs makes his plea for the spirit of mercy 
and good will and declares, “Europe needs a new 
heart.’”’ These men are saying in effect that the need 
of men and the heart of the divine are found in the 
spirit of Christ. 

And so we come to the third place in which we see 
the supremacy of Jesus, or, shall we say, his absolute 
meaning for us. Jesus is the master of the faith of 
men, he is the revelation of God. What would you 
ask of the sphinx, some one proposed to F. W. H. 
Myers, if you could be assured of an answer to a 
single question. “Is the universe friendly to me?” 
was the reply. That is what we all want to know. 
To believe in some kind of a God is not hard, to realize 
that the world has some sort of oneness, that there 
is a Power that moves in it all and this power is one. 
But is this a power like ourselves? Can we speak to 
it and will it hear? And does it care, is it friendly, 


114 THE MEANING OF GOD 


is it good? Can we say with Browning in his 
“Reverie”: 
“From the first Power was—I knew. 
Life has made clear to me 


That, strive but for closer view, 
Love were as plain to see.” 


Now the supreme .meaning of Christ for faith lies 
here; he has fixed for us our ideal of the character 
of God and he has given us the courage to believe 
in a God like this. For our study then of this central 
matter of the character of God we go to Jesus. Our 
creeds, as Hastings Rashdall has pointed out, set forth 
everything except the character of God, which is the 
real matter for us. What has Jesus to teach about the 
character of God? 

The holiness of God is as truly a part of Jesus’ 
thought as of that of the Old Testament. In its earliest 
connotation, as we have seen, holiness had reference 
not to moral character but to the sovereignty, the 
majesty of God as the exalted one. It came unfor- 
tunately to be connected too much with the idea of 
separation, of ceremonial cleanness, and with matters 
of ritual. That may be the reason why, outside of a 
single passage in John, there is no word of Jesus which 
associates the term “holy” with God. But even in 
the Old Testament holiness had come to have a moral 
meaning; the prophet saw that it was in moral char- 
acter, in righteousness and mercy, that the majesty and 
elevation of God were most plainly to be found. “My 
thoughts are not your thoughts,” he declares. I will 
show mercy, not vengeance; “for I am God and not 


THE GOD OF OUR LORD JESUS CHRIST 115 


man; the Holy One in the midst of thee.”® And 
Jesus held the idea of holiness, though he did not use’ 
the word. For Jesus God was holy in both senses.’ 
God is utter and perfect goodness. God is also majesty 
and power, and men are to worship in awe and to 
pray, “Hallowed be thy name.”’ The message of the 
mercy of God has its deepest meaning because it is 
this God that is lifted up who thus draws near to men. 

The thought of the righteousness of God, so sig- 
nificant with the prophets, is also present with Jesus. 
With him, as with them, it is not the idea of a God 
measuring out to men reward or punishment as they 
deserve; that is our legalistic degradation of the term. 
The prophet saw righteousness and redemption as one. 
Jehovah was “a just God and a Savior.’ It meant 
one and the same thing when he said, “I will bring 
near my righteousness, and my salvation will not 
tarry.’ * Jesus gave the deathblow to legalism, the 
religion of rights. The Sermon on the Mount makes 
clear the difference in human life between righteous- 
ness and rights (justitia and jus). Righteousness, or 
justice, looks to that order of life in which all, least 
and greatest, will have the fairest and fullest chance 
which the thought and devotion of man can secure. 
A righteous God is one who seeks this for men and 
who asks this spirit of men. It is itself inseparable 
from mercy. It is not a hard practice, but a high 
passion devoted to this great goal. It is concerned 


6 Isaiah lv.; Hosea xi. 8, 9. 
T Isaiah xly. 213. xlvi. 13. 
8 Matthew xx. I-15. 


116 THE MEANING OF GOD 


with the welfare of man. It is the spirit which made 
Jesus utter that extraordinary word, that it were better 
for a man to be drowned in the sea than to make even 
a little child to stumble. The God of Jesus, the right- 
eous God, is one whose throne is moved when men are 
hard or cruel toward their fellow men. 

But the heart of Jesus’ conception of God is the 
thought of his love. Never had this been seized so 
clearly, never set forth with such beauty and power. 
This too was not new. The Old Testament has a 
deep sense of the mercy of God and speaks of God as 
Father. But love never became so central and so con- 
stitutive of the deepest nature of God as with Jesus. 
With him it is an overflowing goodness to which there 
is no limit. The least of God’s creation shares in his 
loving thought, the flower whose brief beauty came 
from him, the unnoticed sparrow whose fall does not 
escape his eye. There is no line drawn here because 
of race, there is no limit from lack of desert. His love 
is like the sun that floods all the earth alike, going 
out to the evil as to the good. And yet it is not some- 
thing impersonal and vague, like this enveloping light 
of day. It is an individual concern, it is like the love 
of a father for whom each boy, no matter how large 
the household circle, has his own place of affection 
and concern. But this goodness is not sentimentality ; 
this love is moral in its quality and its power. It has 
no counterpart in the weak indulgence which parents 
often show their children. Its concern is not to give 
us ease and spare us pain, but to secure for us the 
highest life at whatever cost. It offers men the incal- 


THE GOD OF OUR LORD JESUS CHRIST 117 


culable gift of fellowship with God; but the gift, 
though free, is most exacting in what it demands in 
return. It is a case of “the utmost for the highest,” 
man’s surrender of his highest thought, his deepest 
purpose, his central affection, And it is a love which 
costs God as well as man, if the cross of Christ be, as 
we hold, the very deed of God. The love of God is 
one that sorrows for men, and suffers with them and 
for them, and goes out to seek them. Such a love 
is reconciling, redemptive. And such a fellowship is 
the highest creative moral power that we know. With 
such a vision of God one can easily see how fear and 
distrust on the one hand and the failure of utter devo- 
tion on the other were the deepest of sins of men in 
the thought of Jesus. 

In all this we must recall again the fact that it is 
not simply with Jesus’ teaching about the character 
of God that we are concerned. It was out of his own 
life that this vision grew, and it was the spirit of that 
life that weighed with men even more than his words. 
The faith of the Church is here summed up when we 
say that we believe in a Christlike God. We know 
what the Father is when we look upon the Son. 

The limits of time as well as of the theme of these 
addresses rule out the consideration of the question 
of the person of Christ and of the Christian doctrine 
of the Trinity. We are concerned with the meaning 
of God as he comes to men in Jesus Christ. It is 
well, however, to remind ourselves again and again, 
especially in times of controversy, that the vital ele- 
ments of Christian faith lie here in the realm of re- 


118 THE MEANING OF GOD 


ligious experience and moral conduct. We have asked 
three great questions concerning God, the greatest 
questions that the mind of man can propose: What 
is God like in his character, in his attitude toward 
men? What is the will of God for man, the ideal 
of individual life and the goal of our humanity? What 
help may we have from God? In the answer to these 
questions the place of Jesus is secure, and is absolute. 
This was the faith of men before they discussed mat- 
ters of substance and essence and person. This is the 
faith that theology will emphasize more in the future. 
So conservative a theologian as Dr. James Denney 
held this in his later writings: “It is of no use to revert 
to the decision of Niczea and Chalcedon in the present 
distress. . . . Christology in future will not find ex- 
pression in terms like ‘substance, hypostasis, and per- 
sona.” It may humble itself and acquiesce in agnos- 
ticism as far as the questions are concerned which 
these terms were employed to answer; but on the two- 
fold ground that we owe to Jesus our knowledge of 
the Father and that the kingdom of God for which 
we hope is a kingdom which comes as his ascendency 
in human life is realized, it will assert for Jesus a 
place which is all his own in Christian faith—a faith 
in virtue of which he determines once for all both the 
believer’s relation to God and his relation to his fellow 
men.’ *® The discussion of the person of Christ will 
inevitably go on, but we have lost something of the 
confidence that our theories represent the absolute 
truth, and something of the dogmatism that once 


9 The Constructive Quarterly, June, 1914. 


THE GOD OF OUR LORD JESUS CHRIST 119 


sought to enforce uniformity here. We have learned 
a little more truly where religion itself really lies, and 
where Christian unity is to be sought. The formal 
creeds have their value, but it is plain historical fact 
that no one set of definitions has ever commanded 
universal assent in the Church. And it is equally true 
that through the divisions and disputes of the ages 
there has remained the unity of those who found in 
Jesus Christ the God whom they could trust, the ideal 
that could command their conscience, the saving help 
by which they lived. 


Note. The quotation from Dr. James Denney, given on page 
98, should be stated in full: “I believe in God through Jesus 
Christ His only Son, our Lord and Saviour” (p. 350, “Jesus and 
the Gospel’). Dr. Denney’s Conclusion (pp. 329-361) deserves 
careful reading. No one has stated more clearly or strongly than 
this conservative theologian the central and absolute place of 
Jesus for historic Christianity, for its conception of God and 
life and for its experience of the saving help of God. But Dr. 
Denney saw, aS many conservatives of our day do not see, the 
difference between the place of Christ in faith and the theological 
interpretations. “It is this distinction,” he declares, “between 
soundness in faith—a genuinely Christian attitude of the soul to 
Christ, in virtue of which Christ determines the spiritual life 
throughout—and soundness in doctrine—the acceptance of some 
established intellectual construction of faith, on which emphasis 
needs to be laid” (page 340). 


VI 
THE INDWELLING SPIRIT 


“PERHAPS the oldest and most persistent of all our 
religious ideas,” says Prof. E. F. Scott, “is that of the 
Spirit.” * The idea itself is by no means limited to 
the Christian religion. It appears in Zoroastrianism 
and is even more significant in later Stoicism. The 
mystery religions also deal with the idea of a divine 
presence or power coming to the initiate through their 
rites. But quite beyond the instances where the idea 
seems more definitely expressed, there is the concep- 
tion common to both primitive and advanced religions 
of the divine as a power that moves in human life. 
The New Testament bears witness to the central place 
which this idea occupied in the early Church. Jesus 
is represented as being filled and empowered by the 
Spirit, especially at the beginning of his work. Pente- 
cost appears as the birthday of the Christian com- 
munion, Not only are the leaders fitted for their tasks 
by the gift of the Spirit, but the Church as a whole > 
is the dwelling place of the Spirit and every disciple 
as disciple shares in this gift. No one can read these 
pages sympathetically without feeling the deep and 

1“The Spirit in the New Testament,” page 11. | 

120 


THE INDWELLING SPIRIT 121 


joyous sense that these early Christians had that God 
dwelt in their midst and that they were indeed living 
in the presence and by the power of the Eternal. 

In view of all this the neglect of the doctrine of 
the Spirit in fhe Church is surprising. Compared with 
other great doctrines, the thinkers ofthe Church have 
given it little attention. In the earlier centuries when 
the ecumenical creeds were being shaped, and the doc- 
trine of God was the central question, thought was 
centered almost wholly on the person of Christ and 
the Trinity. Later generations have not given it 
greater consideration. The attitude of the great body 
of Christian believers has corresponded to this, and 
in the minds of most of them the term calls forth only 
the vaguest of ideas as compared with their thought 
of God as Father or of the historic Jesus. 

There are definite reasons for this and of various 
kinds. First is the lack of clear and adequate con- 
ceptions. The idea of the Spirit is one that roots 
back in primitive religious life and thought, beginning 
with animism and spiritism, and at no point has 
spiritual and ethical thinking taken longer to do its 
work. Older ideas lingered on. We see the process 
of change in the Old Testament, and there are sur- 
vivals of the earlier ideas in the New. The Spirit 
has been too much conceived in terms of force, rather 
than as ethical and truly spiritual. It has been limited 
too much to the unusual, and its meaning for normal 
Christian life and experience has not been appreciated. 

A second reason is that this doctrine, usually in 
some inadequate form, has been especially exploited 


122 THE MEANING OF GOD 


by groups that have been more distinguished by en- 
thusiasm than by sound judgment or even, in many 
cases, by solid moral qualities. The early Church 
shows us the conflict of bishop and prophet, where 
the bishop appealed to tradition and stood for order, 
while the prophet with equal force stood for the con- 
viction of the early Church that truth and guidance 
came from the Spirit of God who dwelt in the Church 
and spoke through whom it chose without special 
reference to elections and appointments. But authority 
and order won out, and the emphasis on the doctrine 
of the Spirit remained with groups and sects that were 
inclined to be the more extreme because of the attitude 
of the general Church toward them. Montanism 
represents the type, and later history shows cor- 
responding groups from the Anabaptists down to the 
Holy Rollers of our day. 

The third is the influence of ecclesiasticism here. 
The Church, of course, did not give up the doctrine 
of the Spirit, but the work of the Spirit was defined 
and confined until it came under the control of the 
institution and became perfectly safe. In the Roman 
Catholic Church the Spirit spoke infallibly through 
Scripture and tradition and general council and, 
finally, through the ex cathedra utterance of the pope. 
The Protestant Church tended more and more to make 
the Scriptures such an infallible expression, cul- 
minating in a doctrine of verbal infallibility that was 
as dangerous to the free religion of the spirit as 
Catholicism. In many cases, moreover, its attitude 


THE INDWELLING SPIRIT 123 


toward its creeds put them practically in the same 
class of inspired and infallible organs.’ 

But however imperfect the thinking, and however 
much the abuse of the doctrine in practice, this idea 
of the indwelling Spirit has persisted in the Church 
and is rightly receiving new interest and new attention 
to-day. The reasons for this are plain. Historically 
there is, first of all, the place which this idea has in 
the New Testament. There is, secondly, the persistent 
religious experience of men who have found a life 
and strength that came not of themselves, a power 
that fitted them for their tasks, a spirit of love that 
changed their attitude toward others, a peace and joy 
that filled their hearts. The meaning of this for our 
concept of religion comes next. For it is here that 
Christianity finds the union of the religious and the 
ethical which we demand, in a Spirit that is God’s 
gift to dependent man, while at the same time it is 


2Note the quotation from J. G. Machen in Richards, “Chris- 
tian Ways of Salvation,’ page 219. Professor Machen denies 
that the Westminster Confession is a denominational affair or 
“merely one expression of the progressive Christian conscious- 
ness. It is rather a final and absolute statement of Christian 
truth ultimately to be accepted by the whole world.” Consider 
also what was implied in the action of the Methodist Episcopal 
Church in seeking to place its Articles of Religion beyond pos- 
sibility of any revision or amendment. Viewed from one side, 
this would seem to imply a pretty wide assumption of absolute 
inspiration on the part of the General Conference which took 
such action and which undertook to determine thus what must 
be believed for all future time by the Church. On the other 
hand, it apparently denies the conviction of the presence and 
continued guidance of the Spirit in the Church which has had 
so much emphasis in Methodism. 


124 THE MEANING OF GOD 


essentially man’s own spirit, his own life possessed 
and expressed in freedom and responsibility. Finally, 
the idea of the indwelling Spirit is essential to the 
Christian thought of God and to those elements which 
are gaining increasing significance for us: the God who 
dwells with men and moves in all the world’s life, the 
God of love whose very nature it is to give himself, 
the God of moral personality who is like men and with 
whom it is therefore possible for man to have com- 
munion, that is, the sharing of life. To this study 
we are further impelled because the negligence of the 
Church has furthered the growth of such movements 
as Christain Science, New Thought, and Theosophy, 
which appeal to men at this point, as the old mystery 
religions did, by professing to relate men to the divine 
realities and to enable them to share in their powers. 

If we turn now to the Bible to note the idea of the 
Spirit there contained, we shall find two constant ele- 
ments. First, the work of the Spirit is always thought 
of in relation to man, not in connection with the opera- 
tion of God in nature. Secondly, the Spirit is thought 
of in terms of power, a power from God coming into 
human life. Beyond these simple elements, however, 
there is wide diversity in conception. Nor is it simply 
that the earlier ideas are more crude and the later more 
developed. We find rather the divergence of two 
broadly distinguished tendencies, which rest back 
naturally upon the difference in the way in which God 
is conceived in his nature and his relation to his world. 
One of these conceptions may be called the primitive, 
though its influence persists to our day. 


THE INDWELLING SPIRIT 125 


Turning to this more primitive conception first, we 
find its distinguishing mark in its thought of God as 
power or essence alien in nature to man. When the 
Spirit of God comes upon a man, it is as a strange 
and alien power that it seizes hold of him, There is 
nothing necessarily moral in its nature. In Samson, 
for example, we find it in a man of anything but ideal 
character, and what it does for him apparently is 
simply to contribute superhuman physical strength. 
The spirit of his exploits is about as remote from 
what Paul identifies as the fruit of the Spirit as well 
could be. Sometimes the Spirit produces a state of 
ecstasy or frenzy. The man’s own spirit goes out as 
the Spirit of Jehovah comes in; in a somewhat literal 
way he is thought of as beside himself or, as the 
Germans phrase it, outside himself. Something like 
this seems to be illustrated in the incident of “Saul 
among the prophets.” * The great prophets stand over 
against all this. It was probably because of this situa- 
tion that Hosea declared: “The prophet is a fool; the 
man that hath the spirit is mad.”’* And this may 
explain why Jeremiah, the most spiritual of the 
prophets, deeply conscious that Jehovah is speaking 
through him, yet makes no reference to the Spirit, 
and why Amos flatly protests that he is not a prophet 
nor a member of any prophet school. In all this the 
work of the Spirit is seen in the unusual and abnormal, 
is thought of in terms of an alien power, and is asso- 
ciated commonly with a high emotional state. 


8; Samuel xix. 18-24. 
4 Hosea ix. 7. 


126 THE MEANING OF GOD 


This conception of the Spirit, which is not distinctly 
Christian but has most likeness to what is found in 
other religions, lingers in early Christianity and recurs 
in later times. We see it represented in the speaking 
with tongues. If we take Paul’s discussion in his 
letter to the Corinthians as our guide, and this of 
course is a first-hand testimony, then the speaking with 
tongues appears to have been an unintelligible utter- 
ance under high emotional strain, and this ecstatic 
state the Corinthians viewed as a peculiarly notable 
work of the Spirit greatly to be coveted. Here again 
is the stress on emotion and the idea of a power that 
comes in as alien to a man and takes him out of 
himself. The same conception appears in a widespread 
idea of inspiration. The earliest illustration of this 
we have in Philo, but his theory reappears very soon 
in Christian writers. “A prophet,” says Philo, “utters 
nothing of his own, but the foreign message of another 
who speaks through him.” “His own intelligence 
departs at the arrival of the Divine Spirit, and returns 
with its departure, for it is not lawful for the mortal 
to dwell with the immortal.” Nor is the prophet, ac- 
cording to Philo, able to understand what he utters.° 
Here again the Spirit is thought of as an external. 


5 See Rees, “The Holy Spirit,” pages 50, 51. Compare Plato, 
cited by E. F. Scott, “The.Spirit in the New Testament,” page 
166. “God takes away the minds of the poets and uses them 
as his ministers, and he also uses diviners and holy prophets, 
in order that we who hear them may know that they speak not 
of themselves who utter these priceless words in a state of. 
unconsciousness, but that God is the speaker, and that through 
them he is conversing with us.” 


THE INDWELLING SPIRIT 127 


power, of a nature essentially alien to man, and with 
a method of control more or less mechanical and com- 
pulsive. Along this line move all the theories of verbal 
inspiration, The essential kinship between God and 
man is denied. The Spirit does not come in to change 
and. renew the spirit of a man in thought, in discern- 
ment, in love and truth, so that seeing he may speak. 
The action of the Spirit has no necessary relation to 
a man’s moral character; it is simply a force con- 
trolling, communicating words, restraining from error, 
and the picture of the writer as the passive pen in 
the hand of God is used again and again.® 

It is here that a modernist like Kirsopp Lake steps 
in with the suggestion that this whole conception of 
the Holy Spirit be given up. “Does the experience of 
controlling force which the prophet feels really come 
from some external influence, or is it merely his con- 
sciousness of ordinarily unknown depths in his own 
nature? It is obvious that a theory of prophecy could 
be made on lines rendered familiar by psychologists, 
by suggesting that what happens in a prophetic ex- 
perience is the sudden ‘coming up’ of what is or- 
dinarily ‘subliminal.’ It is, however, important to 
remember that this is merely a modern hypothesis just 
as the Jewish view of inspiration was an ancient one. 
But it is impossible in a rational theology to combine 
fragments of two wholly different explanations of life 


6 Hodge, “Systematic Theology,” I. 155: “Inspiration in itself 
has no sanctifying influence.” See R. A. Torrey, ‘What the 
Bible Teaches,” pages 282, 283, for a recent statement insisting 
upon inspiration as the communication of infallible words. 


128 THE MEANING OF GOD 


and of the universe. ‘The Spirit’ was an admirably 
intelligent phrase in the Jewish or early Christian view 
of the universe; it does not fit in well with the modern 
view of the universe. Similarly the theory of sub- 
liminal action fits very well into the modern view, but 
not into that of traditional theology.” * 

The issue here, however, is a much larger one than 
that contained in the question as to what happens to 
the prophet, and the alternative even in the prophet’s 
case is not that of traditional theology versus the sub- 
liminal consciousness. We are dealing here with the 
question that underlies our whole discussion: Can the 
divine enter into the human? How is God related to 
man? Leaving particular theories aside, there is in- 
volved here the fundamental Christian conviction that 
God and man can have real fellowship, that God, 
creating, redeeming, transforming, giving of his own 
life, can and does thus enter into human life. That is 
what God means to us, the creative Power pouring 
forth its life in the shaping of his world. If he gives 
life thus on the lower plane, shall we draw the line 
when we come to life at the highest, and say that 
here in the rational, moral being of man God cannot 
give of that truth and love and righteousness which 
make the heart of his being? The criticism of Pro- 
fessor Lake obtains against a particular theory. It 
does not, however, reach the question whether there 
is such an intercourse between God and man in which 
- God through his Spirit enters into man. It simply 
assumes that a psychological description is an ultimate 


7“Landmarks of Early Christianity,” pages 43, 44. 


THE INDWELLING SPIRIT 129 


explanation. Nor does Professor Lake appreciate the 
presence in the Bible of another conception of the 
Spirit and its work which is of greater significance 
for us. 

In the conception which we have just considered 
God is conceived as Being or Power above man and 
fundamentally different in nature. The Spirit is then 
thought of as a force that controls as it were from 
without, whose work is seen in extraordinary gifts or 
experiences. The conception to which we now turn 
emphasizes the nature of God as personal and es- 
pecially his moral character. Religion then becomes 
more and more a personal relation morally conditioned. 
To this the idea of the Spirit naturally corresponds. 

We begin with the prophets. What the prophets did 
for the idea of the Spirit was not so much through 
what they said about the Spirit of Jehovah, as through 
their thought of God. Their idea of the righteousness 
of God was not wholly new, but they brought out its 
meaning and made it determinative. God was not first 
of all an overlord to be pleased with offerings, nor 
a strange power and majesty to be approached with 
correct ritual prescription. God was righteousness. 
Religion became essentially a personal relation marked 
by reverence and righteousness in the worshiper, and 
the service of God was to be found in a life of justice 
and mercy shown to fellow men. God was not a mys- 
terious and alien power whose Spirit laid hold of the 
prophet and wrought ecstatic experiences. Rather he 
was known in his historical dealings with his people. 
Where the idea of inspiration was not denounced as 


130 THE MEANING OF GOD 


with Hosea, or passed by as with Jeremiah and the 
seventh-century prophets, it became as with Micah 
moral insight and moral passion: “But as for me, I 
am full of power by the Spirit of Jehovah, and of 
judgment, and of might, to declare unto Jacob his 
transgression, and to Israel his sin.’ * Such a con- 
ception of God and of religion turned the thought more 
and more to the moral and spiritual as the sphere of 
God’s action in man. The Spirit is to come to the 
messianic king and to the people of the new age as 
the spirit of a new life. The Spirit will mean wisdom 
and understanding and counsel and might and knowl- 
edge and the fear of Jehovah.® Poured out upon the 
people, the Spirit will bring justice and righteousness 
and peace and confidence.*° Jeremiah does not refer 
to the Spirit, yet contributes the supreme Old Tes- 
tament declaration concerning spiritual religion.™* 
Ezekiel still has place for trance and ecstasy and vision 
in the prophet’s life, but he also makes clear this inner 
and moral work of the Spirit: “A new heart also will 
IT give you, and a new spirit will I put within you. 
... And I will put my Spirit within you.” ¥ 

It is to Paul, however, that the Church owes what 
is most distinctive in its doctrine of the Spirit. The 
prevalent Christian thought as he met it still saw the 
work of the Spirit in that which was unusual, extraor- 
dinary, and striking, and conceived of the Spirit as 

8 Micah iii. 8. 

9TIsaiah xi. 2. 

10 Tsaiah xxxii. 15-17. 

11 Jeremiah xxxi. 31-35. 

12 Kzekiel xxxvi. 26, 27. 


THE INDWELLING SPIRIT 131 


a power coming from without and laying hold of a 
man. Such works and gifts as this still have their 
place with Paul, but his emphasis is distinctly upon 
the ethical. That appears above all from the way in 
which he relates Christ and the Spirit. The Holy 
Spirit is not some strange force; it is the Christ spirit, 
the spirit of love and truth and holiness which was 
seen in Jesus. We recall the extraordinary way in 
which Paul uses interchangeably Spirit, Holy Spirit, 
God, Christ, spirit of Christ, when he speaks of the 
divine presence dwelling in man. However he may 
conceive the relation of the Spirit and Christ, this 
much at least is clear: first, the Holy Spirit is for him 
ethical through and through and that in terms of the 
character of Jesus; “the Lord is the Spirit” was one 
of Paul’s epoch-making words.** Second, Paul sees 
the work of the Spirit in the whole range of Christian 
experience; all love and truth and grace, all spiritual 
insight and moral power, flow from this.* Third, 
while the early Church emphasized quite in the tradi- 
tional Jewish manner the extraordinary as the special 
work of the Spirit, Paul saw its supreme work in 
the ordinary and normal Christian life. He did this 
“on the basis of his experience, which showed him 
that the Christian himself was the greatest miracle.” *° 
His chapter on love, coming in the midst of his dis- 
cussion of the gifts of the Spirit, 1s eloquent witness 
to his doctrine. Fourth, the Spirit is for Paul the 


13 2 Corinthians ili. 17. 
14 Galatians v. 16-25; Romans viii. 4-6. 
15 Gunkel, “Die Wirkungen des heiligen Geistes,’ pages 80, 81. 


182 THE MEANING OF GOD 


Spirit of God. Whatever Paul’s teaching may mean 
for trinitarian doctrine, the Spirit is not some inter- 
mediate being or some power put forth by God, but 
is God himself dwelling in men. Finally, though the 
Spirit is thus a supernatural gift, yet it is part of his 
own conscious life; the love, the truth, the purity are 
man’s own spirit, his thought and will and emotion. 
The religious and the ethical are here united. The 
life is wholly the gift of God, the work of the Spirit; 
and yet it is wholly a life of faith, that is, of man’s 
trust and obedience. It is true there are other elements 
in Paul’s conception, not merely in his recognition of 
such gifts as tongues, but possibly even in his concep- 
tion of the sacraments. What has been pointed out 
is simply those elements in which the higher and the 
distinctively Christian teaching appear. 

One conclusion has become plain from this discus- 
sion, The doctrine of the Spirit cannot be settled by 
discussing it as a theologumenon by itselfi—and what 
doctrine can? Ina specially intimate manner it de- 
pends upon our thought of God and of the relation 
between God and man, that is, of religion. Paul is in 
the line of the prophets and Jesus. God is not thought 
of first of all in terms of power, strange and distant, 
or of the sovereign ruler. Religion is not an institu- 
tion to which men submit, whether of law or creed 
or ecclesiastical rule, nor is it the incursion of some 
alien force into human life. God is personal and 
rational and perfectly good. He is like us or, to put 
it the other way, we are made in his likeness. Religion 
is a personal relation, a fellowship which demands 


THE INDWELLING SPIRIT 133 


above all else moral likeness. The supreme declaration 
about God is that he is Christ-like. The supreme 
revelation of religion is that given us in the spirit of 
Jesus of Nazareth, in the life that he lived as Son 
with his Father, as man with his brother men. It is 
on this basis that we must understand what the Spirit 
of God is and how the Spirit is given to men. 

We may summarize then this second conception of 
the nature of the Spirit. The Spirit is the Spirit of 
God, not something apart from God sent by him to 
man. The Spirit is our term for God conceived as 
giving himself to man and dwelling in man. The 
Spirit is personal and ethical as God is personal and 
ethical, and in the measure in which the Spirit is shared 
by man he shares in this higher being of God. As 
God is Christlike, so the character of the Spirit is 
Christlike, and the final test of its presence in a man 
is Christlikeness of spirit. 

The higher conception of the Spirit here suggested 
did not maintain itself in purity in the history of the 
Church. Two other points of view in particular were 
influential. The first is the idea already considered, 
deriving from primitive religion and coming to early 
Christianity through Jewish thought. The Spirit is 
here conceived in terms of power, not a moral-personal 
power acting from within but a compulsive power 
moving from without. Thus we have the modern in- 
stances of speaking with tongues, and the ecstasies and 
trances and jerks and similar phenomena that have 
appeared with certain kinds of camp meetings and re- 
vivals and types of mystical experience. The same 


134 THE MEANING OF GOD 


idea of the Spirit as “power” lies back of certain con- 
ceptions of sanctification and of the “higher life.” 
The symbols of fire and water as suggesting the Spirit 
and its action have their justification, but their use by 
certain groups suggests that men forget that these are 
only symbols, while they press the literal picture until 
they have a process conceived as really mechanical. 
Here again the Spirit becomes an external force work- 
ing in mechanical and not in moral-spiritual fashion. 
Or take a scene in which, with a maximum of noise 
and emotion and a minimum of thought and moral 
purpose, men call for the “power” to come down, and 
find the answer to their prayer in some ecstatic ex- 
perience. This too is the primitive idea of the Spirit. 
This conception has had special place in the ‘“enthu- 
siastic” sects and groups from Montanism down to the 
Holy Rollers. We must not overlook the fact, how- 
ever, that they represented a justified protest against 
the effects of ecclesiasticism and institutionalism on 
personal religion. Rightly they asserted that religion 
was a living experience of God in the conscious life 
of men, that each soul might receive in the Spirit of 
God a life and power higher than himself, and that 
for this he might go to God himself. 

The other conception of the Spirit has a philosophic 
source, coming into the Church principally through 
Greek thought and religion. God is conceived here 
in terms of substance or essence rather than of power. 
Humanity belongs to the order of that which is sinful, 
perishable, mortal. God is infinite, spiritual, incor- 
ruptible. Salvation is the transformation of corrup- 


THE INDWELLING SPIRIT 135 


tible being into the incorruptible, of the mortal into 
immortality, of the human into the divine. Here is 
the basis for the whole ecclesiastical-sacramentarian 
conception of salvation. Consistently with this idea 
of God, the Spirit given to man is conceived more 
as a divine substance transforming our humanity. 
This divine substance is infused through the sacra- 
ments. As a Roman Catholic authority says, “It is 
understood to be ‘subjected’ (to inhere) in the essence 
of the soul; it is more commonly regarded as a 
‘physical’ entity, not a moral participation in the 
Divine nature.” *° 

These last considerations have brought us to the 
heart of our study: how does the Spirit of God come 
to men and work in men? The Christian doctrine of 
the Spirit involves always a two-fold conviction: first, 
that all our spiritual life is the gift and deed of God, 
all truth and love and goodness that we may possess; 
second, that this gift is not something which we hold 
apart from God, but rather that this is the very life 
of God himself, his presence in us. It becomes then 
a question of supreme importance, How does man 
share this life of God? Around this question moves 
the whole doctrine of salvation when rightly conceived, 
and the Christian idea of grace is but another way 
of stating the same matter. 

Here again it is the idea of God that men have that 
is determinative, and this must first be illustrated by 
a consideration of traditional doctrines of the way in 


16 “E'ncyclopedia of Religion and Ethics,” article “Grace,” VI. 
308 


136 THE MEANING OF GOD 


which men are assumed to receive the Spirit, or divine 
grace. When God is conceived primarily as-sovereign 
Power, as in the Augustinian-Calvinistic tradition, 
then you have logically the idea of irresistible grace 
whose action is wholly dependent upon the will of 
God and does not necessarily work through the con- 
scious and moral experience of the subject, who is in- 
deed essentially passive and impotent. Back of sacra- 
mentarianism is likewise, as we have seen, an absolu- 
tistic conception of God except that now he is absolute 
essence, an order of being in sharp contrast with 
humanity. But again it is not personal-ethical experi- 
ence that is needed ; the divine is not primarily personal 
and ethical, and as substance it can be mediated 
through such impersonal media as the physical ma- 
terials of the sacraments. In both cases, this idea of 
the absolute transcendence of God plays into the insti- 
tutional idea of religion; the divine is not present in 
personal fellowship, but mainly in such divine agencies 
or ordainments as the Church and its sacraments, the 
inspired writing, and the authoritative creed. What 
may be called the ecstatic-emotional conception of the 
Spirit follows the same line. For it God is not the 
being akin to man with whom man may therefore have 
fellowship in the normal experiences of life; as the 
transcendent and mysterious Being his Spirit enters 
man with an inrush of emotion as something extraor- 
dinary if not abnormal. 

The contrasted conception, as we have seen, is that 
which thinks of God first of all as personal and ethical. 
However dependent it may see man to be, however 


THE INDWELLING SPIRIT 137 


imperfect or even sinful, yet it emphasizes the likeness 
of being in man and God at this essential point. With 
this goes an idea of religion plainly contrasted with 
the institutional conception suggested above or the 
relation of the mere dependent to his Sovereign. The 
heart of religion becomes a personal fellowship morally 
conditioned. 

Such a fellowship permeates all of man’s life and 
demands it all. Man is to love God with his mind, 
not vaguely to feel or blindly to submit, but to hear 
the God who says, “Son of man, stand upon thy feet; 
come now, and let us reason together.” It is the reli- 
gion not of servants, but of friends who know what 
their Lord doeth. It calls upon the will, not for blind 
obedience it is true, but for a devotion which goes 
far beyond what the mere servant can yield. The 
religion of fellowship demands that higher righteous- 
ness of the Sermon on the Mount, where man is one 
with God as his son in the inmost spirit of his life. It 
asks us to see the high purpose of God for ourselves 
and the world and to make that purpose the ruling 
motive of life. It is a fellowship that includes man’s 
heart, his emotions. It calls for awe and reverence 
that is all the deeper because this most high God offers 
men the privilege of life with him. It involves love 
and trust, and thus the joy and peace which flow from 
these. It unites heart and will when it asks us to share 
the life of God in our attitude toward our fellow men, 
so that in the spirit of service and utter good will we 
may show ourselves children of our Father. 

This is the religion to which God summons us, the 


138 THE MEANING OF GOD 


religion of personal fellowship realized in communion 
with him and in right relations with our fellow men. 
But this religion is not only our life, it is God’s gift; 
it is in and through such personal fellowship that this 
God gives himself to men. That is the significant fact 
for our discussion of how the indwelling Spirit is re- 
ceived. The analogy of human friendship illustrates 
this most simply. This man is my friend. He has 
riches, he has position and influence; he has what is 
far more, the wisdom of years, the wealth of broad 
culture, the treasures of a great soul. The great 
treasures of life come from such friendship, and the 
greatest of these is the friend himself, his own wisdom 
and love and spirit as they enter into my spirit. And 
he gives himself to me through the practice of our 
friendship. So God gives himself, his Spirit, to be- 
come a new life in men. Was not this the message 
of Jesus? It is true he did not discuss it, but he set 
it forth in parable, in saying, above all in his own 
life. His picture of religion was just this picture of 
a life of fellowship which the children live with their 
Father. He made plain its demand of utter devotion, 
of inner likeness of spirit, of unwavering trust, of 
reverent fear. But he also made clear how God gave 
himself in this fellowship, how eagerly he desired his 
children thus to come to him, how freely he gave to 
them. There is more of the Christian doctrine of 
salvation here than one would surmise who had simply 
studied volumes on the atonement or discussions of 
the various kinds of grace. 

Let us look more closely now at this personal fellow- 


THE INDWELLING SPIRIT 139 


ship as the channel through which God gives his Spirit 
to men. The significance of the sacraments of the 
Church is not, of course, denied here. They have their 
value in quickening devotion, in aiding our sense of 
the invisible, in uplifting us through acts of common 
worship, and so in furthering communion with the 
highest and making access for God to man. But that 
God has limited himself in special manner to these 
ways, or that the material or visible in itself may 
become the channel for a necessary operation of grace, 
this falls below the plane of personal and spiritual 
religion. Nor is there a denial here of the value and 
need of the emotional. The error lies in supposing 
that the apprehension of the mind and the attitude of 
the will are of minor importance, or in supposing that 
the occasional intense emotional experience is the one 
door by which the Spirit comes in, The fault of tradi- 
tional thought, on the whole, has been rather in what 
it has excluded than in what it has emphasized in 
considering how God shares his Spirit with men. The 
whole idea of grace and the means of grace needs 
greatly to be broadened and especially to be ethicized 
and humanized. The following paragraphs point out 
three of the doors by which the Spirit of such a God 
as ours enters into human life; in their brevity they 
are intended simply to be suggestive. 

The Spirit of God is the Spirit of truth and as such 
works through the truth. There is no access to the 
human soul, not even for God himself, except through 
the truth. That does not mean that correct knowledge 
and spiritual experience are one, nor that the Spirit 


140 THE MEANING OF GOD 


of God is excluded by imperfect understanding. The 
God of faith is not so much a theological doctrine as 
a practical demand; he comes as love and righteousness 
asking obedience. The first summons that comes to 
primitive man asking him to give himself for some- 
thing that is higher than himself involves some appre- 
hension of the divine whether he gives to it the name 
of God or not. And history shows how, amidst all the 
divisions and isms, men have come into living fellow- 
ship with God and showed by their lives the presence 
of his Spirit. Yet in every case there is a truth, an 
ideal, to which men surrender, a light which they fol- 
low. The larger truth, then, though it does not neces- 
sitate, yet makes possible the larger entrance of God. 
As a matter of fact the great periods of forward 
movement or of religious quickening in the Church 
have been connected with some new or renewed appre- 
hension of truth. One needs but think of such names 
as Paul and Augustine, Francis of Assisi, Luther, and 
John Wesley.*’ Here is the significance of that rela- 
tion between Jesus and the Spirit which is revealed in 
the New Testament. The early Church was deeply 
conscious that it was through Jesus that its new ex- 
perience of the Spirit had come, and we have seen the 
close relation in Paul’s thought. In Jesus there had 
come a new and vivid apprehension of God and his 
purpose and of the meaning of life; that truth was 
an open door by which could enter a new experience 
of God’s presence. Here is enforced also the value 


17 See “The Next Revival of Religion,” in “Living Issues in 
Religious Thought,” by H. G. Wood. 


THE INDWELLING SPIRIT 141 


of meditation. It may take but a moment to assent 
to 2 statement of fact or to grasp a theoretical proposi- 
tion; but the truth involved in moral and spiritual 
ideals is made our own only as we meditate upon it 
and indeed live with it. 

The Spirit of God is Holy Spirit and as such works 
through moral fellowship, through a right moral rela- 
tion. In its original sense the word “holy” here no 
doubt meant transcendent, as it did elsewhere; it bore 
the thought that this Spirit was from above and not 
of man, ‘That truth remains, but for our current 
use the adjective has a moral meaning; the Spirit is 
goodness, love, righteousness, or, as Paul put it, the 
Christ spirit. Such a Spirit can be received by man 
only in a life of moral obedience, a fellowship of will. 
We come here to the aspects of spiritual life which 
Jesus especially emphasized. Here is involved the de- 
votion, or consecration, of life to God, the constant 
expression of that devotion in the varied affairs of life, 
the openness to truth, the aspiration toward good and 
God, the inner loyalty of spirit, and above all the active 
expression of the Divine Spirit in our relations with 
men. This Spirit of God man can receive only in 
moral loyalty and can possess only as he constantly 
lives it out. 

We need to note also the significance of man’s social 
life in relation to the Spirit of God. It is in the fellow- 
ship of man with man that fellowship with God is 
most deeply enjoyed; it is in and through the social 
group that God can most freely and fully give himself. 
The reason for this is not hard to find. It.is simply 


142 THE MEANING OF GOD 


stating the religious meaning of the familiar fact that 
human personality is social and is achieved only in 
social relations. Here is God’s way of making men; 
not in the isolation of the individual, but in the social 
group. Here lies the first meaning of the Church, 
but how commonly that meaning has been missed by 
the ecclesiast. It does not mean that the Spirit speaks 
only through the authority of the Church or works only 
through her controlled channels of grace. It is not 
the institution that counts here, but the fellowship, the 
koinonia which the New Testament sets forth. Here 
is a spirit of common faith and love and devotion and 
sense of God; the early Church felt that that spirit of 
the group was the Spirit of God. The Spirit was the 
real life of the Church, and the fellowship was the 
great way that God had of imparting his Spirit to the 
individual. But though this is first, we cannot stop 
here. All true fellowship is an open door for God’s 
entrance and an expression of his presence. ‘Where 
love is, God is.” The highest fellowship will, of course, 
be mutual and be that which is joined to the highest 
interests of life. But he who goes where human need 
is, he who takes to men a spirit of good will, a passion 
for righteousness, a devotion to service, he will receive 
of the Spirit of God as surely as does he who bows 
in worship with the great congregation. This is the 
message that underlies the poem, ‘“The River of God,” 
dedicated to Jane Addams and offering an interpreta- 
tion of her life.* 


18 Frank Crane. 


THE INDWELLING SPIRIT 143 


“There is a river the streams whereof 
Make glad the City of God.’ 
I went through death to find this thing 
And all through heaven I trod. 


“Now heaven’s a wide and wonderful place, 
But the people are much as we, 
So I came back home in sorrow and thirst, 
And there one said to me: 


““Q) fool, you have traveled far to find 
What you’ve crossed over time and again; 
For the River of God is in Halsted Street 
And is running black with men.’ 


‘And low in the rushes the river sings, 
And sweet is its spirit lure, 

For it waters the joys of loving and living 
That grow in the hearts of the poor,’ 


“So I took me a place in the City slums 
Where the River runs night and day, 

And there I sit ’neath the Tree of Life 
And teach the children to play. 


“And ever I soil my hands in the River, 
But ever it cleans my soul, 

As I draw from the deep with the Silver Cord, 
And fill the Golden Bowl.” 


One point more needs to be made in connection with 
this conception of religion as fellowship, and of fellow- 
ship as the way by which God comes into human life. 
Does it not bring us nearer to a satisfactory answer 
to the question how the religious and the ethical may 
be joined together, how God and man may really meet? 
On the one hand is the demand on man’s part for a 
religion of freedom and initiative; the life that we 


144 THE MEANING OF GOD 


want must be our life, our deed, our achievement. On 
the other hand is man’s need and the great query 
whether indeed God can come into human life. You 
cannot answer that question by simply equating God 
and man, after the manner of pantheism; it does not 
meet our need to lump our poor humanity together 
and call it God. You cannot meet the problem by so 
setting man and God over against each other that a 
real union is impossible, or by so setting the God of 
might above man that man becomes creature and pup- 
pet. You can meet it if your God is supreme not 
simply as all-dominating power but as truth and holy 
love, lifting man up through the ages of increasing 
purpose to the level of personal life, and then giving 
himself to man in free and gracious personal fellow- 
ship. And so at our close, our highest conception takes 
us back to the words of Jesus: “When ye pray, say, 
Father.” 


INDEX OF AUTHORS 


Ags, E. S., “The Psychology 
of Religious Experience,” 8; 
“The New Orthodoxy,” 28, 
29. 


BALFOUR, JAMES, “Theism and 
Humanism,” as 


BECKWITH, rel Aue) -ldea of 
God,” 44. 
Brown, WILLIAM ADAMS, 


American Journal of The- 
ology, 64. 

Browninec, “Fra Lippo Lippi,” 
81; “Luria,” 88, 92; “Rev- 
erie,” I14. 

ces: Joun, “My Own,” 
26. 

BuTLeR, SAMUEL, “God the 
Known and the Unknown,” 
21. 


Catvin, “Institutes,”’ 31, 64. 

CARNEGIE, eee “Autobi- 
ography,” bE 
ARRUTH, W. H Bach i in His 
Own Tongue,” "Al. 

C vial Workers M agazine, 


5 
Crane, FRANK, 143. 


D’Arcy, ArcuzisHop, in “God 
and the Struggle for Exist- 
ence,” 46. 

DENNEY, James, “Jesus and the 
Gospel, MiG, Flo. 510. 


GuNKEL, H., “Die Wirkungen 
des heiligen Geistes,’ 131. 


Harnack, A,, 
schichte,’ 48. 
Hopce, CHARLES, “Systematic 

Theology,” 127. 
Hunt, Frazier, “The Rising 
Temper of the East,” 87. 


“Dogmenge- 


TRWELL, LAWRENCE, The Medi- 
cal Times, 86. 


Jacks, L. P., “Religious Per- 
plexities,” 97. 

James, Wittiam, “A Pluralis- 
tic Universe,” 65; “The Will 
to Believe,” 82; “Pragma- 
Ristiton O34; 

Ketter, Heten, “Optimism,” 
86. 

Ketitocc, S. B., Brbhotheca 
Sacra, 65. 


Lake, Kirsorp, “Landmarks of 
Early Christianity,” 128. 

LANKESTER, E. Ray, quoted by 
Thomson, “Science and Re- 
ligion,” 36. 


Macuen, J. G., quoted in 
“Christian Ways of Salva- 
tion,” by G. W. Richards, 
123. 


145 


146 


MARTINEAU, JAMES, quoted by 
H. G. Wood, “Living Issues 
of Religious Thought,” 24. 

McConneLt, F. J., “Diviner 
Immanence,” 44. 


Otro, Rupotr, “The Idea of 
the Holy,” 8. 

OweEN, JoHN, quoted by H. G. 
Wood, “Living Issues of Re- 


ligious Thought,” 24. 


Puro, quoted by Rees, 126. 

PLatTo, quoted by E. F. Scott, 
“The Spirit of the New Tes- 
tament,” 126. 

Pratt, J. B, “The Religious 
Consciousness,” 47. 


Ratt, H. F, “A Working 
Faith,” 107. 

deer T., “The Holy Spirit,” 
120. 

Royce, Josiau, “The Problem 
of Christianity,” 33. 

RUSSELL, BERTRAND, “Principles 
of Social Reconstruction,” 
66; “Mysticism and Logic,” 
77: 


Scort, E. F., “The Spirit in the 
New Testament,” 120, 120. 
ScHAEDER, ERIcH, (“Theozen- 

trische Theologte,” 34. 
Simpson, J. Y., “Spiritual In- 
terpretation of Nature,” 50. 

SOCRATES, 79. 


INDEX OF AUTHORS 


SoperstomM, N., “Natiirliche 
Theologie und Allgemeine 
Religionsgeschichte,”’ 29. 


“Gi- 
in the 


TAGORE, RABINDRANATH, 
tanjali,” 49. 

Taytor, Bert LEsToN, 
Chicago Tribune, 80. 

TEMPLE, WILLIAM, “Founda- 
tions,” 99. 

TENNYSON, “In Memoriam,” 20. 

Torrey, R. A., “What the Bible 
Teaches,” 127. 

TROELTSCH, Ernst, in “Religion 
in Geschichte und Gegen- 
wart,’ 81. 

Tynpatt, H., “Fragments of 
Science,” 50. 


VAN Becevaere, E. L., in “En- 
cyclopedia of Religion and 


Ethics,” 135. 
Wess, C..C. J., quoted in 


“Foundations,” 20; God 
and Personality,” 46, 47, 48. 
WELLs, H. G., “Mr. Britling 

Sees It Through,” 7. 
WESLEY, JoHN, “A Survey of 
the Wisdom of God in Crea- 
tion,” 50. 
Witson, Wooprow, “The New 
Freedom,” 53. 
Woop, H. G., “Living Issues in 
Religious Thought,” 140. 
WorpswortH, “Lines Above 
Tintern Abbey,” 43. 


INDEX OF SUBJECTS 


Absolute, The, 21 ff. 
Authority, 62, 72, 75. ae 
Autocracy, and religion, 64, 66. 


Calvinism, 31, 64, 70, 80, 136. 
Christianity, and social prob- 
oe 50; and democracy, 65 


Christology, 117 f. 

Church, and democracy, 67; 
basis of unity, 119; and doc- 
trme Ole opirit,. 122.0133 ft. 

Creation, and evolution, 37 ff,, 


50. 
Creeds, 118; and Spirit, 123. 


Democracy, 58 ff.; opposition, 
58, 74; and personality, 59 f.; 
and freedom, 60 f.; and soli- 
Gavive 01. as al taithy. Gioh: 
and authority, 62; and obli- 
gation, 63; and Christianity, 
OcateeO5 tt) 75 iit. cvand) idea 
of God, 64 ff.; and conflict, 


87. 
Divinity of Christ, 107. 


Evil, problem of, 78 ff. 

Evolution, 18 f.; and creation, 
38 ff.; in Christian thought, 
50; in history, 92 f. 


Faith, pagan, 57; with democ- 
racy, 61, 74; with God, 74; 
for democracy, 76, 


Freedom, 60 f.; and religion, 
68 ff., 75; as method of God, 
69 f.; and authority, 72. 

Future life, 93. 


God, consciousness of, 8 ff.; 
as higher, or transcendent, 9 
ff., 14 ff.; as power, 14 ff.; 
as purpose, 18 ff.; as good- 
ness, 20; as Absolute, 21 ff.; 
transcends knowledge, 23 f.; 
as near (immanence), 30 ff.; 
personality, 47 ff.; democ- 
racy of, 64 ff.; autocracy of, 
64, 66; method of, 70 ff.; au- 
thority of, 72; sovereignty, 
72; and law of obligation, 
73; faith in man, 74; and 
natural order, 81 ff.; and 
justice, 83 f.; and evil, 78 ff.; 
suffering, 91 f.; revealed in 
Jesus, 113 ff.; holiness, 114 
f.; righteousness, I15, 120, 
love, 116; as indwelling, 
F200: 

Greek philosophy, influence of, 
32; and doctrine of Spirit, 
134 f. 


Holiness, 12 ff., 114 f. 

Holy Spirit, see Spirit. 

Humanity, Sacredness of, 67 f.; 
can be changed, 74 f. 

Humanity of Jesus, 107 f. 


147 


148 


Inspiration, 126, 129 f. 


Jesus, 98 ff.; life, 100 f.; moral 
lordship, 102 ff.; and salva- 
tion, 108 ff.; and social sal- 
vation, 111 ff.; as revelation 
of God, 113 ff.; and Spirit, 
131, 140. 

Justice, 83 f. 


> 


Law, in nature, 81 ff. 
Love, of God, 116. 
Loyalty, 65 f. 


Mystery religions, 101, 109. 
Mysticism, revival of, 11. 


Nature, God in, 37 ff.; moral 
indifference, 81 f.; and law, 
81 ff.; cruelty of, 85 ff.; and 
pain, 85 f.; and struggle, 86 f. 

Nearness of God (immanence), 
30 ff.; in creation, 38 ff.; as 
loving help and good-will, 44 
ff.: and personality, 47 ff.; as 
indwelling Spirit, 120 ff. 


Obligation, in democracy, 63; 
with God, 73. 


Paganism, 57 f. 

Pain, 85 ff. 

Paul, doctrine of Spirit, 130 ff. 

Personality, human, 59 f.; sa- 
credness of, 67 f.; and social 
life, 90 f. 

Personality of God, 43 ff.; re- 
ligious meaning, 47; social 
meaning, 48 f.; historical de- 
velopment, 51. 

Premillennialism, 65, 60. 

Prophets, doctrine of God and 
Spirit, 129. 


INDEX OF SUBJECTS 


Religion, nature of, iti, iv, 3 ff., 
28 f., 30 f.; roots of, 4 f£.; 
religion and science, 16 ff.; 
and the Absolute, 22 ff.; as 
fellowship, 47; and _ social 
problems, 56; and freedom, 
66, 68 ff.; as fellowship, 137 
f. §.as ethical ras 

Righteousness, of God, I15. 

Roman Catholicism, 13. 


Sacramentarianism, 135, 139. 

Sacraments, 135, 139. 

Salvation, and Jesus, 108 ff.; 
social, 111 ff. 

Science and religion, 16 ff., 35 
ff.; and evolution, 18 f. 

Sinlessness, of Jesus, 105. 

Sin, IIo. 

Social change, 53 ff. 

Social gospel, 111 ff. 

Social ideals in Christianity, 
yA 

Solidarity, 61. 

Sovereignty, of God, 72. 

Spirit, 120 ff.; as fundamental 
religious idea, 120; neglect 
of doctrine, 121 f.; and 
creeds, 123; abiding impor- 
tance, 123; in Bible, 124; 
primitive conception, 125 ff.; 
tongues and inspiration, 126; 
personal and ethical concep- 
tion, 129 ff.; with prophets, 
129 f.; with Paul, 130 ff.; in 
the Church, 133 f.; how 
given, 135 ff.; through fel- 
lowship, 138; through truth, 
139 £.; and Jesus, 41303 
through moral _ fellowship, 
141; through social relations, 


141 ff 


INDEX OF SUBJECTS 149 


Subliminal consciousness, 127. God, 9 ff., 13 ff.; moral, 24; 
Suffering, vicarious, 91 f. as power, 25 ff. 
Theodicy, 78 ff. Unconscious, The, 127. 


Tongues, speaking with, 126. 
Transcendence, or farness, of | Vicarious suffering, 91 f. 





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